Everybody gets old! This is one of the oversights of most bucket lists I've seen: They only give you things to do that make sense when you are fit, fertile, and have the rest of your career to pay off any debts you acquire.

"Old age has it's pleasures, which, though different, are not unequal to the pleasures of youth."  - W. Somerset Maugham 

I am collecting a list of treasured experiences available only to the dying and decrepit. If you have suggestions, by all means! I'd love to hear them. ^_^

1. Do random ninja rolls in public
2. Do something memorable and bold with my hair (like an anime haircut)
3. Go back to college and learn learn learn. Earn a Ph.D.
4. Play on toys that didn't exist a decade before
5. Wear whatever clothes I want. Pirate clothes, 18th century ball gowns, fairy godmother outfits... whatever makes me happy whenever I feel like it. Things that make me want to frolic. Mix it up. Then do stuff like this: http://mylifeisaverage.com/story/3113672/ 
6. Die penniless. ("The man who dies rich dies disgraced." Andrew Carnegie) 

If Mormons have it right, then when we die 1) We'll get perfect bodies that will never die again, 2) Earth will still be around for us to appreciate, and 3) Fun will not end. Wholesome recreational activities are part of maintaining a successful marriage, right? And we believe in eternal marriage. Well here's my list of epic date ideas for eternity, babe. 

1. Squirrel suit skydiving. Turn off immortal antigravity superpowers if necessary so I can enjoy this the old-school way.
2. Marathon skydive (26.2 miles up. It's a super-sonic freefall from the edge of space!)
3. Run on water
4. Go sailing in a hurricane
5. Get struck by lightening on purpose. Like... bait the lightening. =D
6. Make dragons. Then ride them. 
7. Play dinosaurs with real dinosaurs
8. Climb Mt Everest.
9. Solar surf the edge of a nebula (view link from :40)
10. Shoot heavy metals into a star to trigger core collapse. Also play with pair-instability supernovas.
11. Scuba dive without air tanks
12. Go over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel
13. Design sunsets
14. Grow enchanted fairy gardens we can wander and get lost in
15. Weave a dress of spider silk, bioluminescent algae, and arachnocampa luminosa (glow worm) threads
16. Just hold hands with you. 'Cause I don't think I'll ever get tired of that either. 
17. Take all the time needed to master a symphony of instruments. Finally compose the music that haunts my head
18. Watch reruns of our lives. Specifically look for moments when I pranked people but didn't get to see their face.
19. Snuggle up next to a tiger for a nap
20. Learn what all those poisonous mushrooms really taste like
21. Solo climb the Yosemite Half Dome

• Have a true encounter with God… something that leaves me different afterwards and motivates me to try harder
• Once you’ve done that, help someone else find God
• Accept a gift I cannot repay
• Fall in love and never recover
• Learn to cook... really cook. ("Don't only practice your art. Force your way into it's secrets" - Beethoven)
• Feel a baby kick inside the mother’s womb
• Make peace with all my regrets
• Help a homeless person out of homelessness
• Inspire a child
• Save an orphan
• Make friends with someone who I thought badly of before I ever met them
• Maintain a close friendship until you’ve known the person longer than you haven’t known them.
• See the good in the world
  
  

1. Figure out who I am
2. Give the coat off my back
3. Adopt at least one child
4. Make antibubbles
5. Visit the Waitomo Glowworm cave in New Zealand
6. Live for a month without a clock, watch, calendar
7. Conquer my eating disorder forever (“Dare to love yourself as if you were a rainbow with gold at both ends.” ― Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams)
8. Feel incredibly sexy (Thank you)
9. Open my 7 Chakras (from Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon series. ^_^)
10. Shower under a waterfall
11. Find 5 things that give you a sense of your comparative cosmic minisculity (swim with a great blue whale, walk to the top of the world’s tallest building, look through a big ‘ol telescope in an observatory, walk across a country, Stand at the edge of a cliff that overlooks an unforgettable vista
12. THEN have a George Bailey experience, where you discover 5 things that make you feel needed, valuable, and irreplaceable… Things that make you realize that you are a vital part of the positive balance of your world.
13. Find and use 50 non-destructive expressions of anger
14. Hike Mt. Timpanogos (I blew bubbles from the top)
15. Jump off a cliff
16. Hold a baby orangutan
17. Catch fireflies
18. Read 1,000 books
19. Touch a real, breathing tiger
20. Learn to DANCE till I’m not ashamed to do it anywhere
21. Donate bone marrow
22. Live for a year in another country
23. Feed someone who is hungry
24. Abandon all insecurities (especially as it relates to doing things I want to do without waiting for someone to do it with me)
25. Hunt and clean a large animal. Use all the parts. (develop respect for meat)
26. Make someone so happy they cry ^_^
27. Ride a galloping horse with my eyes closed (and if I get the chance, race one on the beach)
28. Celebrate romance romantically – Develop a habit of startling my loved one with unexpected moments of awareness of how valuable they are.
29. Get totally lost with a friend
30. Graffiti something
31. Write a hymn (Now record it)
32. Read the entire Bible. Compare it to religious texts from around the world (Tao te Ching [SO awesome], Qur'an, Bhagavad Gita, Zorastrian texts, etc)
33. Do something impossible (I changed the past)
34. Dedicate about 5 years of my life to simple living in a quiet place, gardening, meditating, reading, and just appreciating life.
35. Play all day with someone twice my age
36. Learn something profound from someone half my age
37. Race a dogsled
38. Milk a cow by hand (almost done this. I milked a goat... ^_^)
39. Save someone’s life
40. Blow bubbles from the very top of the Eiffel tower
41. Live in a home I helped build with my own hands
42. Give someone something they can’t give themselves
43. Stick my foot in wet cement
44. Go ice caving
45. Learn to play the cello
46. Cross the Minnesota state line with a duck on top of my head (is against the law… ^_^)
47. Be featured on TED
48. Visit the aurora borealis in person
49. See a moonbow
50. Eat ice cream cone with ice cream in it upside down
51. Watch a spider spin a web
52. Learn to speak 5 Languages: Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, German, and Khmer
53. Make a bosom friend in the Hunza Valley in Northern Pakistan (believed to be the inspiration for Shangri-la in Lost Horizon)
54. See something truly majestic (a change of heart)
55. Plant fruit trees every place I live
56. Run through a cornfield
57. See Les Miserable
58. go couchsurfing
59. earn an epic tan... a real one from the sun.
60. get a Mohawk
61. Run a marathon in the Sahara
62. Hijack a local radio station with squirt guns and tell the audience that you are kidnapping the DJ until he gives you concert tickets
63. Master stand-up comedy
64. Communicate with someone without sharing a common spoken language
65. Find Meagan, my first childhood friend
66. Give Free Hugs in a country not my own with a sign in a language I don’t speak
67. Play Calvinball (wear masks)
68. Learn to play a sport I didn’t know existed
69. Go sailboating and learn how to manage the craft
70. Make friends with someone who has the same name as me and find out why I am still unique
71. Give birth naturally and/or
72. Give birth with dolphins
73. Send a message in a bottle
74. Age gracefully
75. Get CPR and WFR certified
76. Be debt free
77. Learn to save and invest wisely, become a millionaire, then do amazing things with it. (Jacob 2:17-19)
78. Meditate in a cherry blossom garden in Japan
79. Participate in a 24-hour-create-something-awesome-as-a-team challenge
80. Forget my own birthday
81. Dance the funky chicken on my 50^th wedding anniversary
82. Wear a yin-yang piece of jewelry until it falls off irreparably
83. Watch myself have heart surgery
84. Attend Loy Krathong, the sky lantern festival in Thailand
85. make a crop circle
86. Allow myself to make mistakes
87. Partner yoga
88. Acro-yoga
89. Do something I wouldn’t normally do just because it doesn’t matter one way or the other.
90. Live somewhere different long enough to pick up an awesome accent
91. Do something not because I want attention but just because it’s the right thing to do
92. Return everything I’ve borrowed but forgot to give back
93. Put an antique trunk in my attic that is locked up mysteriously, hide all the keys, put something awesome inside, and never answer my kids about what is inside it. Basically, give my kids a real-life mystery thrill. ^_^
94. Play 1,000 pranks
95. Get trained in microexpression reading
96. Develop emotional intelligence and learn the art of emotional coaching
97. Live for 24 hours as if they were my last – In fact, maybe make this the way I celebrate my birthday every year.
98. Learn to be comfortable shooting pictures of people I have tender feelings for
99. Go blind for a month (use blind contacts designed for theater)
100. Make my own fortune cookies from scratch and hand them out
101. Witness the butterfly migration in Monterey, CA
102. Make my mom feel loved and completely accepted
103. Make a tradition of telling stories and reading books to my children.
104. Henna
105. Go sand sledding
106. Celebrate Christmas in a summery place
107. Complete Mahoney’s First Concerto (Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium)
108. Come up with a nightly winding down routine and stick to it for a year
109. Get Semilunar Biopsy Repair either disproved or accepted by the medical community
110. do a 365 project
111. Find a perfume that makes me really happy, or make my own
112. Hug the man who started free hugs! ^_^
113. Celebrate my birthday like a 4-year old (I want a dinosaur-shaped birthday cake, superman icecream, pin the tail on the donkey, a water fight with a kiddie pool, and I want to give everyone who comes presents I made for them)
114. Participate in a massive, feathers-flying pillow fight (International Pillow Fight Day)
115. Deliberately stand next to a huge puddle in a busy street to get soaked
116. Laughter yoga!
117. Hear the boy’s choir sing at the morning festival in England (Shadowlands)
118. Go scuba diving (because before I had heart surgery it would have killed me)
119. Experience flight... Either paraglide in an epic mountain range like the Alps or... something.
120. Participate in a really awesome flash mob (Pirates night will count!)
121. Learn the ninja roll
122. Have a pet female capuchin monkey named Sensei
123. Learn to walk on stilts
124. Parkour
125. Salute the sun on every continent (North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica)
126. Experience a day of perfect health
127. Publish a book
128. Swim in a place where the ocean is so clear I can float and it looks like I’m levitating
129. Record a CD of songs I’ve written
130. Take a chemistry class where I get to blow things up
131. Stop and listen to a street musician for three full songs
132. Accomplish something I once believed to be impossible for me (Surf, walk on my hands, 10 pull-ups...)
133. Attend church with a black soul-singing congregation
134. Acquire the skill of cinematography and then make a full-length documentary. Doesn't have to solve world peace... Can even be a documentary of my kids. But document something that matters.
135. Host a break-even lemonade stand
136. Do a photo-essay of 100 shots all taken upside down
137. Street photograph for at least one day
138. Earn another name (like the ASL culture of earning a name… someone has to give it to you)
139. Make my journey to Mecca (Most people don’t get major opportunities to travel, so find one place on the planet that is your holy ground… The birth place of whatever in your life brings you the greatest  peace. Sacrifice to go there, and come back a better person.) For me, this is India.
140. Dress up epically for Halloween and trick-or-treat for a kid who’s stuck in the hospital
141. Write letters to people I haven’t met yet. Deliver them when I do.
142. Ride an elephant
143. Swim with bioluminescent plankton
144. Celebrate The Festival of Colors in India
145. Get rid of all my inauthentic clothes
146. Raise my children bilingual
147. Play Twister with paint blobs
148. Stomp grapes
149. Make someone laugh so hard they wet their pants
150. Cry so hard I laugh
151. Host a couchsurfer from another country
152. Acknowledge 10 of my great fears and face them - “See what you are afraid of!”
153. Raise a family
154. Plant as many trees as I will use in my lifetime
155. Wear out a pair of pants in one day
156. Have a yard I never have to mow
157. Snorkel-explore an underwater sculpture park
158. Team into the The Battle of the Oranges in Italy
159. Help the person who lives next door in a significant way
160. Invent an awesome holiday and make it an annual family tradition
161. Shoot “The Hope That Is In Us” resurrection photography project I started
162. Do the work of an untouchable for a day
163. Complete my bachelor’s degree (because education is the #1 regret for older people). Pursue a Masters.
164. Restore someone’s faith in humankind
165. Send an oddly-shaped package in the mail
166. Leave a present in the mailbox for the mailman during the Christmas season when his route is hardest.
167. Photograph lightning
168. eat roadkill
169. Help plant fields in India during their annual monsoons
170. Also attend the monsoon festival
171. Read a full book of Thoreau’s. I love every quote of his that I’ve ever run across. Time to read a full work.
172. Read The Little Prince
173. Experience a full solar eclipse
174. Songkran in Thailand (Mid-April, world’s biggest waterfight, lasts 3 days!)
175. 12 years of Ninja classes in lieu of PE for my kids and neicphews. (stealth, self-defense, parkour, use of ancient weaponry, etc.) Participate in it and become the ultimate ninja.
176. Wear happy-colored converse shoes till I wear holes in 'em.
177. Carve my name into a tree
178. Learn to fly a small open plane. Then actually fly it in the clouds during an epic sunset.
179. Exchange locks of hair with someone I love deeply
180. If space-faring tech becomes commercially viable in my lifetime as I suspect it will, see the earth from space.
181. “Drive” a self-driving car
182. Wear an invisibility cloak
183. Experience an anechoic chamber
184. Take a mediation certification course
185. Learn to play the hang
186. Visit Denmark's Natural history museum
187. Hike across Kauai, Hawaii
188. Participate in a polar bear plunge
189. Buy a Veteran a drink and listen to their stories
190. Learn how to lucid dream
191. Try vegemite
192. Climb the rigging and set the sail on a tall ship
193. Sleep all night on the beach
194. Guerrilla poetry date (leave inspirational poems in random places. Try to sneak them into people's purses and stuff. Anti pick-pocketing)
195. Send a message in a bottle
196. Climb Squaw Butte and leave a letter for my children in the letterbox
197. Learn to spin fire / fire poi
198. Fly a plane. Do a barrel roll.
199. Spend a month living with real gypsies
200. Shoot a flaming arrow
201. White water rafting
202. Whittle my possessions down to only 100 things
203. Publish a photo in National Geographic
204. Watch the entire Planet Earth series
205. See Cirque de Soliel
206. Start a food fight
207. Win NaNoWriMo
208. Eat outside my comfort zone
209. Hike an active volcano (Pacaya?)
210. Tie a rope swing over water
211. Learn to give epic and soul-rejuvenating massages
212. Climb Mt. Olympus dressed in a toga. Eat pomegranates, greek yogurt, fruit nectar, and ambrosia at the summit.
213. Participate in a candlelight vigil
214. Be greeted with a lei in Hawaii
215. Host kin reunions every 2-3 years throughout my life (Kin – Not just blood relations. Anyone that you understand and have an understanding with)
216. Build up a static charge and kiss somebody
217. Play an elaborate time travel joke
218. Catch fish with my bare hands
219. Try miracle berries
     220. Eat mammoth steak 
     
     
     My one hesitation about this list? 
     I don't actually believe my life is about me... =/
     And the day I finally figure that out... I think that's the day I'll really start to live.
     
     
     So here's to the search for genuine selflessness
     and to keeping my selfish self sane until I learn how to love.
     
     
     

     
     

     
     

     Like this? Check out my other bucket lists: 

     Bucket List of Things To Do As A Really Fetching Old Person

     
     

     And my personal favorite: Bucket List of Things To Do When I'm Immortal 

Dear friends and followers,

I've decided to merge my two blogs, Confessions of a Perfect Person, and this one, Adventures of My Travelling Octopodes.

Confessions of a Perfect Person has been an anonymous blog where I explored my life struggles and shared my epiphanies, while hiding from judgement. I didn't want acquaintances to look sideways at me thinking, "You struggle with what?!?"

Adventures of My Travelling Octopodes has been a happy, bubbly rainbow place where I can dream and laugh and lighten my heart.

Our struggles and our dreams... We keep them separate, and I think this is a mistake.

I stopped posting in Confessions (stopped facing my problems) because spending too much time thinking about hard stuff weighed me down. I stopped posting Octopus pictures because my dreams weren't coming true. I hit a wall of massive depression, curled up into a ball for months and lost 10 pounds from anxiety.

Why do you come here? It's not really to live vicariously through a free-hearted girl who never grew up... It's because your life is hard, and you're looking for hope. I want to honor that.

If you only remember one thing about me, I want you to know that I struggled—so much—but I never. gave. up.

You want hope? The colorful, laughing imp... that is still truly me. But lest you think only perfect people can live this life, I wish you show you my demons for the first time. I want to prove that no matter what scars you bear or what wounds are still festering, happiness is possible NOW. I want perfect people to know as well... it is okay to struggle. And it's okay for others to see your struggles... In fact, it helps.

I'm going to keep posting on this URL ('cause it's prettier) but the blog title is officially changing to Adventures of My Traveling Octopodes: Confessions of a Perfect Person.

It will be a combination of the two: I need laughter to get through the hard times. And I need a problem-solving chalkboard where I can confront the monstrosities that keep me from my dreams.

The true story at last.

Comments appreciated!

(Credit to Allie Brosh, author of Hyperbole and a Half for making me believe a sporadically posting blogger who sometimes drowns in sadness can still make a difference if they are honest. You made a difference for me. =)