Just thinking along

I'm going to ignore that lapse in posts.  Let's pretend like that part of time never existed, so there's nothing to talk about. 

Having said that, I've been having deep thoughts again.  I haven't been drinking that much, so it's not the beer's fault.

I've came to the sudden realization that life is short.  Sure, we all know that, but do we really recognize what it means?  I have multiple lifetimes of things I'd love to do.  Here's the bucket list for when I become an immortal vampire:

1) Be a career man.  Focus on climbing the corporate ladder, and then probably realize then all the things I missed out on.  But the point would be to know I can do it.
2) Become fluent in German and Italian.  Italian is beautiful, but German is closer to my heart.  Both are excellent reflections of the the people that speak them.  To study a language is to study a country, it's people, and it's history.
3) Be a great cyclist.  Ride 10k+ miles a year and multiple years, and see just how good I could become.
4) Climb mountains.
5) Live in enough diverse places to appreciate their uniqueness, and miss the place I just left.
6) Be a ski/bike bum.  Not really a bum, just someone who lives without care of their 401k, how tall their grass is, or what their future plans are.
7) Be a great pianist.  And guitar player.  I might be able to work those in still.
8) Drive a Ferrari.  Long enough to throughly enjoy it, and definitely long enough to get it out of my system and realize what a waste/hassle/expense they are.  You could replace "Ferrari" with lots of things.
9) Learn to sail
10) Learn to fly a plane
11) Build guitars.  I think there is something in working with your hands, and to create something that allows you to create further, well that's pretty cool.
12) Build more houses.  Yes I hate it.  But I get better at it each time.  Maybe eventually it'll get easier.
13) Move somewhere completely foreign, and completely adapt and fit in. Like move to somewhere in Europe where you don't speak the language and have to find a job, make a life.  Yes, this would be utterly stressful, but it would test nearly everything you've ever learned.
14) Try harder in college.  Somehow my sister's work ethic wasn't ever imparted on me.  Things did come too easy to me in school, except for when they didn't.  I knew enough to get by.  That was rough, and a lesson I'm still dealing with.
15) Read more.  The older I get, the more I realize that reading matures a person quicker than nearly anything else.  First-hand experience would probably trump it, but I'm sure as shit not going to take up bullfighting.

So maybe the list still has some time to get completed.  We'll see.

I also have been thinking about what makes a person "successful".  I had some stupid magazine (I think it was KC Places or something like that) delivered on my door yesterday.  Rampant materialism is all that I saw.  There were a few interesting pieces, I suppose, but ad after ad of expensive trinkets and so forth.  I wondered how any of that was going to make anyone any better off than before they had that $2k purse.  I think it's a modern Western Civilization thing, but aren't we smarter than that?  Seems odd to me all the great minds in the world, but yet we seem to sink to the lowest common denominator.  Why do I see so many women with Coach purses shopping in WalMart too?  Life's ironies are sometimes a sweet delicacy, but other times a reflection of our short-sightedness and human imperfection.

My wife thinks I'm half Eddie-Vedder-let-society-burn and half-Johnson-County-poster-boy.  I'd have to agree, and it ain't easy.