This is the first list of many.
Below are 40 things I will not be doing or experiencing before I turn 40. Many are related to childhood dreams that were not properly tended. Others are newer aspirations. I’d love to do or experience these things, but they’re just not going to happen, at least not in the next 40 weeks. It’s not that these goals are necessarily impossible, but my past 39 years needed to be quite different to make these things attainable by April. I’m okay with that.
I will note that in a some cases intervention by the right person(s) may be able to compensate for lack of preparation on my part, so if Anna Wintour, Jeremy Renner or the appropriate Pulitzer juries are reading this please contact me.
- Win a Pulitzer Prize (Drama or Fiction. I’m not picky)
- Be featured in an editorial fashion spread in Vogue Magazine
- Meet all my mutual Twitter followers in real life
- Be knighted by Queen Elizabeth (Can women even be knighted?)
- Have a quirky cameo in a great movie
- Voice an animated character
- Be drawn into a comic book (or graphic novel)
- Have an action figure modeled after me
- Have a delicious cocktail named after me
- Have a set of pizza toppings named after me
- Have an ice cream flavor named after me
- Be a polyglot
- Be a former beauty queen
- Be a math genius
- Design a robust encryption algorithm (Item 14 is a likely prerequisite for this)
- Be someone’s muse
- Touch Jeremy Renner (I’m married, so anything more would be inappropriate.)
- Be independently wealthy
- Have my own tropical island
- Find a lipstick that doesn’t make my lips dry
- Be the lead singer in a rock band…
- …Or a night club chanteuse
- Go to an inaugural ball
- Do a space walk
- Discover life on another planet
- Definitively prove or disprove the existence of god
- Bring back the AMC series Rubicon
- Be included in one of those “40 under 40” lists
- Be one of those people who can sit down at a piano and play hundreds of songs from memory
- Perform with Cirque du Soleil
- Be a sound bite on Radio Lab
- Be an answer to a question on Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me
- Redo the WBEZ program schedule so the best stuff is on when I’m most able to listen
- Watch the Cubs win the World Series (Remember: that would have to be THIS season)
- Have one of my plays performed at the Humana Festival
- Have Martha Plimpton perform some of my Boob Juice monologues
- Star in Mourning Become Electra at a Tony Award-winning regional theatre
- Invent something and patent it
- Eradicate the world of its evils: disease, famine, violence and reality tv*
- Bring all my favorite people together in one city for a gigantic party
What won’t you be doing before your next birthday?
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*As confessed in a follow-up post, there are reality tv shows that I like. I only want to eradicate the ones I don’t. I apologize for any panic I needlessly caused for fans of Top Chef and Project Runway.
Kim Z. Dale 