Instagram thinks my blog violates community standards, so I had to post a link to this old dusty thing. My "new" blog is over at Suebob's Red Stapler. Please visit me there.

On Not Having A Fridge

I know this is ostensibly a food blog, but bear with me as I veer off into food politics a bit. I was watching The Daily Show and found this clip from their continuing series on Class Warfare. The quote about the poor beginning about 4:30 in floored me:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
World of Class Warfare - The Poor's Free Ride Is Over
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

So now people aren't considered poor if they have a refrigerator. A REFRIGERATOR!

It started me thinking about the last time I had to live without a fridge. I moved into a house with no fridge and had to buy a new one. I'm obviously not poor, or I would have gotten a 30-year-old used one that sucks up $300 in electricity every year like I used to have.

I bought one at Sears and they said it wasn't in stock and would take a week to deliver. No problem, I thought. I can survive a week without a fridge. I can eat non-perishable food and eat out and what-have-you, because I can afford that stuff.

But if you don't have a fridge and you do want some perishable food, say something nutritious like milk, cheese or eggs, you need ice.

I didn't have an ice chest, because I was only missing a fridge for a week, so I just put the ice and milk in a dish pan and covered it with a baking pan with newspapers on top for extra insulation. Still, I had to buy ice every day. It was messy and inconvenient and expensive, but for me, with my income, it was a short-term problem and I could easily survive.

If you're poor, you don't have the same luxury of eating out and wasting money on small quantities of food and having the comfort of knowing a brand new fridge will be delivered at the end of the week.

Ice is expensive. And heavy. So if you don't have a car - which I'm assuming you don't, if you're too poor to be able to afford a $50 yard-sale fridge - you have to schlep ice. Heavy, cold ice.

Hope you're not old or disabled or live more than a few blocks from a grocery store! And I hope you don't need any other groceries, because once you have a couple sacks of ice, it's pretty hard to carry anything else.

I also hope you have the spare $3 a day you'll need to buy 2 bags of ice. You could make ice almost for free but HEY, THAT'S RIGHT, you don't have a fridge. Sucka. So that's $3 a day - or about $1000 a year you'll need to support your non-fridge habit. And since the federal poverty level is $22,000 a year for a family of FOUR, I'm sure you'll probably miss that $1000 pretty badly.

You could have bought about 750-1000 pounds of dried beans with that same amount of money, but that would be ridiculous. You're poor. You don't deserve a fridge!

And if you do want to cook perishable food, you'll have to buy it in small quantities you can use right away. So instead of buying a pound of margarine on sale, you'll have to buy it by the cube at the corner convenience store, because the market doesn't sell it in tiny quantities. It will cost you about as much as a whole pound, maybe more, but that's the way it goes, right?

You'll probably waste a lot of food, too, from spoilage or getting soaked by water from melting ice, food you can ill afford to lose. But waste is part of the American way! Learn to embrace it.

As you can see, I'm being sarcastic. I'm just hiding the fact that I'm so furious at the numbskulls who think poverty is easy, that it doesn't take cleverness and flexibility and constant scrambling to just get by. They sit up in their studios and have lattes brought to them by production assistants and talk about how poor people have refrigerators and that they are surprised by that. I have two words for them, and they aren't "Bon appetit."

If you love me...

Can you please put my new blog in your reader?

http://suebobdavis.com

Thank you kindly.

Over there! Over there!

Kyran got a new url at Planting Dandelions. You should go read her there.

And my new url is, well, my name. Please bookmark accordingly.

Thank you.

Come visit me at my new place

...same as the old place but with my fancy new url

http://suebobdavis.com

Tips for Not Being a Jerk

Don't make fun of someone's name, no matter how tempting it is. I recently met a woman whose name was the equivalent of "Cleopatra Anthony." I had to hold myself back. It took my force of will. But I stopped myself, because honestly? How often does a person with an odd name hear the odd name joke? ALL THE TIME. I assure you, as someone who knows someone with the last name "Ho," you are not the first.

Do not ask about someone's infirmity or scar. Everyone wants to feel normal. Asking someone "Hey, what happened to your face/arm/leg?" is a sure way to push them right off the normal path. If they want to talk about what happened, they will mention it in their own time, when they like and trust you not to be a nosy jerk.

Some kind of depressing musings on life and burritos

I came home after the gym and Farmer's Market on Saturday and tossed all of my vegetables on the kitchen table and my wet gym bag on the floor.

They were all still there this morning. Monday morning. The vegetables were faded and limp and the swimsuit had that murky, not-so-fresh smell.

As soon as I had gotten home, I had thought "I'm so tired," and I laid down on the couch. Then I got up and went to bed. After about half an hour, I tried to convince myself to get up, but I couldn't move.

One of the great blessings of getting older is a certain amount of perspective. If I had been 20, I would have spent a great deal of time berating myself about what a lazy jerk I was, sleeping a beautiful Saturday - and it was a glorious, warm, sunny day - away.

But being Of A Certain Age, I realized "There must be something seriously wrong with me," and you know, Being of A Certain Age, I was right.

The fever and chills hit about 2 p.m. The cookie-tossing commenced shortly thereafter and lasted for the next 10 hours or so.

Thank God for twitter on my phone, because it was the only thing I could do to pass the long hours - I don't have a TV and reading a book made me even more nauseous. Sleeping led to weird hallucinatory dreams populated by the - I am not making this up - People of Wal-Mart. Standing up, other than to dash to the bathroom, was beyond my capabilities.

I usually love living alone. I don't get lonely. I seem perfectly suited to a solitary lifestyle, a room of my own, a house of my own, a life all my own.

I have to admit, though, as I lay there pinned down by the after-effects of an ill-conceived food stand burrito, that I questioned the wisdom of my decision. Being alone and healthy and happy isn't the same as being alone and sick and incapacitated, is it?

Flat on back, unable to move, helpless. Those were some long and lonely hours, despite my little glowing twitter connection. My tiny little house suddenly felt way too big for just one person.

But despite all of my fantasies of Brad Pitt carrying a cool cloth for my forehead, we never know what life may bring. We may get sick and get a Peter Mayhew, or we may have to be the hero when our loved one gets sick, the hero in ways that are tough and awful and scary.

Or, as happens all too frequently, we may walk out or get walked out upon in our hour of darkest need (no links here - I guess nobody ever blogs about that).

That's the crazy part about life. You just never know. But one thing is for certain: eating a bad burrito will give you a lot of time to think about it.

A War Story (in honor of Veteran's Day)

My dad wanted to enlist in the Army during World War II. He was born in 1918, so he was a bit older than the average soldier when the war rolled around, but like every able-bodied man at the time, he wanted to go.

He signed up and kept reporting for duty, but was turned away several times because the Army had lost his paperwork.

In the meantime, he was working in Long Beach as a welder, building warships. Finally, he got tired of waiting.

He sold all of his possessions, including his car. He reported to the Army with the clothes on his back and $5 in his pocket.

"You have to take me now," he said. "I have nowhere else to go and no money to get there if I did."

They took him, and he served in the 3^rd Army, 261^st Field Artillery Battalion in Europe, including fighting in the Battle of the Bulge.


Dad in Germany, 1945 Click to see larger

Here is a poem my dad carried in his wallet along with pictures of the family. It obviously meant something special to him:
Soldiers

I was that which others did not want to be.

I went where others feared to go, and did what others failed to do.

I asked nothing of those who gave nothing,

and reluctantly accepted the thought of eternal loneliness, should I fail.

I have seen the face of terror, felt the stinging cold of fear, and enjoyed the sweet taste of a moment’s love.

I have cried, pained, and hoped…but most of all I have lived times that others would say were best forgotten.

At least some day I will be able to say that I was proud to be what I was…a soldier.

You Give and You Get

Warning: BusyMom said this should have a tear-jerker warning. Consider yourself warned.

It's a long story, but Catherine of Her Bad Mother asked us to make tutus and run in Central Park at BlogHer 10 as a benefit for her nephew, Tanner.

I was taken with this idea, but I was a bit baffled about how to transport a whole tutu across the country without mangling it, so I came up with a brilliant plan.

I would buy yards of tulle, cut them into strips, and offer people at BlogHer the chance to assemble their own tutus before the benefit race.

I bought tulle. A LOT of it. It was pretty and cheap and I got a little over-enthusiastic, as I tend to do, and I bought about 110 yards:

The tulle was Goldie-approved

I realized that cutting 110 yards of tulle in a hotel room in the compressed timeframe of BlogHer wasn't going to happen, so I had to cut it at home. 110 yards into 4-inch wide strips...It was a big deal.

I decided to cut tulle at my folks' house on the kitchen table, since my only table is too small. And because my parents are lovely, lovely people, they decided to help me.

You mom bloggers know how it is when your kids "help" you make cookies? It was kind of like that.

My mom has bad arthritis and couldn't work for very long, so my dad stepped in. My 90% blind, not terribly steady dad. But dang it, there was work to be done and he was going to do it. He and I fumbled and twisted tulle and cut at funny angles and made mistakes, and there were times I felt like either screaming or running away.

But I took deep breaths and took his help in the spirit it was offered. We got that damned tulle cut into strips and we looked good doing it.

By the time I got to Central Park, I had two sprained ankles and couldn't run. I did have a walk down 6th Ave. to the park in gorgeous, Lakers-colored tutu, and many others at BlogHer got tutus made by volunteers who did tutu construction at the People's Party.




Three weeks later my dad was dead.

Making those "Tutus for Tanner" was the last father-daughter project we ever worked on, and it turns out I'm thankful for those goofy, crazy hours of frustration and screwed-up teamwork.

That's life, isn't it? You just decide to do things and do your best under the circumstances, and sometimes you get a gift you don't expect, a gift that you wouldn't trade all the gold in Fort Knox for. And then you go on to write sentences that end in prepositions, and life goes on.

Sometimes you get lucky

You know my sister's name was Laura.

At BlogHer 2007, I got a new friend, whose name is Laurie. Which is far enough from Laura to not squinch my heart up every time I say it, but close enough to make me think that sometimes families aren't necessarily made by genes.

It also makes me think that having someone you really love take your photograph somehow makes you prettier.

Photo by Laurie White. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Things I Can Say Because I Have PMS

Random Idjit: "The happiest people I know don't have blogs because they are too busy having real lives."
Suebob: "The reason people don't have blogs is because they don't have anything interesting to say."

Random Idjit: "You're exploiting your kids/your family/your friends/yourself to make money from your blog."
Suebob: "If you knew how to make money making anything more creative than Slurpees, maybe you wouldn't be so jealous."

Random Idjit: "I think people that need to put their lives on view all the time have something wrong with them."
Suebob: "Your pathological need to hide from the world is baffling to me."

Random Idjit: "What makes you think everyone wants to know your opinion all the time?"
Suebob: "The way they find out my opinion is by seeking it out. As far as I know, no one has ever been forced to come to my blog or twitterfeed at gunpoint."

Random Idjit: "I just don't understand what you're trying to accomplish."
Suebob: "YOU WOULDN'T."

She was kind to dogs

One night at dinner, some friends and I stumbled onto the topic of Hitler. It was posited that Hitler had no redeeming qualities.

One person said "Well, he was kind to dogs."

That person became famous and derided as a Hitler apologist, all in jest of course. The capstone of the ridicule was when the exMrStapler created a birthday present - a book with a fake dustjacket that featured a large photo of the Fuhrer and the title "Hitler: Kind to Dogs."

Yesterday when I was working at home with the front door open, the neighbor's little dog Katie wandered in. This had happened once before. I have no idea how she gets through the fence, but she must get lonely, because she only comes in when her Mom is off at work.

The first time she came over, she immediately hid behind Goldie's bed and stayed there:


This time, she felt a little more at home. She sniffed around a bit, walked into my bedroom, jumped up on the bed, got under the covers and fell asleep.

I left her there for a few hours before I had to leave, then carried her out and put her back under the fence.

It struck me that I must be some kinda sucka. Who lets a strange dog sleep under their covers?

Me. I do. Despite all my other flaws and shortcomings, at least I'm nice to animals.

Let it be known that I want my epitaph to read: She was kind to dogs.

The poor student

Don't you just love it when you run into people who are absolutely unamused by you? People who you can tell are just really, really underimpressed by your whole existence?

Yeah. That's my physical therapist, Paul.

My last physical therapist, a few years ago, was a chatty, super-hyper Mormon guy who was great. He tortured me appropriately and fixed my shoulder, so it was all good.

Paul did my therapy with a kind of machine-like disaffection. It WAS after 5 on a Friday, so who can blame him? But it was still a bit unnerving to be such a disappointment.

My problem is with my ankles. I had a back injury that has impinged the nerves to my ankles, making them floppy as 3-day old fish. I sometimes fall off my feet just standing there. Honestly.

I sprained both ankles by falling off a curb.two days before BlogHer and I just have to say it is a good thing that being in NYC and at BlogHer don't involve any walking! Because that would be painful. Oh, wait, they DO. Totally do. Yeah. Every night at BlogHer I had cankles like a baby elephant.

Then three weeks ago I fell again going down the 2 stairs in front of my house and hurt my right ankle badly again. I didn't trip or anything - my ankle just refused to hold me up and I toppled over.

So Paul is to help me cure my fish ankles.

He made me do this thing where you lay on a slant board and balance one foot on this tippy thing and try to keep it steady while you use that leg to do a leg press. Not only could I not keep the tippy thing from tipping, I couldn't even feel that it was tipped.

I failed tippy board.

We moved on to something more remedial. Something suitable for even the terminally physically incapable, like me.

He laid these foam board shaped things on the floor, immediately giving me bad flashbacks to Junior High Gymnastics.

Yes, he was making me walk the balance beam. So guess how that went?

I failed balance beam.

He then gave up and put me on the stairmaster and went to chat up a cute athletic girl with a knee injury. And chat. And chat. Approximately 97 minutes later when he got done, he came to check on my progress.

Well, there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is that I don't have ankle problems anymore.

The bad news is that my legs fell off.

Reunited and it feels so fine

Today was the semi-annual Sock Reconciliation Event at Casa de Suebob.

This is the joyous day when all the single socks floating around the place are lined up and carefully matched with their mates.

Results are thus: 16 pair of black socks were rejoined with their mates. One pair of blue socks and two pair of brown were also made whole.

Still unmatched are the not-quite brown rust colored sock that came from God-knows-where, the black sock with the subtle argyle-like pattern that I always think is solid black but only shows after I have put it on and gone to a meeting where I cross my legs, and a really good black spotted Smartwool sock that has remained unmatched for 2 years but is so great of a sock that I cannot betray its trust by tossing out.

Stand by for more exciting updates from Suebob's underwear drawer! Next up: will she ever get rid of those bras with the stretched-out elastic?

Volunteer work should not cause post-traumatic stress

I have ideas, lots of them. That's one of the reasons my Rear-View Life List is so full of wonderful items. I get some nutty notion and then I feel compelled to do it.

It usually works out. Sometimes I convince people to go on a speed boat on Lake Michigan and I find myself flying across the water, laughing my ass off at a guy's ears flapping in the wind with Karen and the Queen of Spain's husband.


Other times, not so much. This weekend was SO not so much.

My work sends out a list of volunteer opportunities every so often. One of the opportunities was to go to this wildlife sanctuary and help them inventory fencing materials.

I asked the organizer if lifting would be required, because, after back surgery, I just don't lift.

"Oh, no," he said. "You can hold the measuring tape." (Spoiler alert: THIS WAS A LIE).

Okay then. CC, Ish and I headed out bright and early to a facility deep within the Angeles National Forest to help the animals.

We had been promised a tour of the place to go along with our labors. We were pointed toward our appointed task: hundreds of rolls of chain link fencing needed to be moved, unrolled, measured and re-rolled, then stacked in order of size.

There was another option: clean up the wood pile. We quickly volunteered for wood pile duty, correctly assuming that fencing duty would suck. About 15 of us took every piece of wood out of a disorganized pile, sorted it and re-organized while the other poor suckers dealt with the fencing.

Did I mention that rattlesnakes live in the woodpile? Oh, yes, they do. I looked down and one was about 6 inches from my foot. I managed not to freak the hell out and Volunteer Wrangler Bob soon moved the snake off into the bushes where he could live to menace volunteers on another day.

This place had the volunteer thing down, though. After about every 45 minutes of slave labor, they would bring a wild animal ambassador around to keep us interested - first a wild boar, then a coyote, then a grey wolf - just enough to give us a break and keep us working.

We finished the snake-infested woodpile and moved on to chain link fencing. After about 16 hours of work, more or less (ok, it was about 3 hours), they said "We just have one more hour, THEN LUNCH, then another hour of work, then the tour."

Lord help me. At that point, I was ready to quit, but CC insisted we stay for the tour. Dang her and her dedication and enthusiasm.

Lunchtime rolled around. We strolled up to get the proferred lunch...aaaaaand there WAS no lunch. Apparently we missed the memo that said we were supposed to bring lunch. We scavenged some stale granola bars from under the seats in the car and glumly chewed them at one of the rickety picnic tables.

Then it was back to work on the chain gang. All the measuring was done, so then it was just re-stacking chain link fence. The measuring-tape holding duty had been claimed by a young, fit guy named Wolf. Thanks for the gallantry, Wolf. You look good there holding that measuring tape while sweaty-faced office workers move heavy rolls of fencing.

I stood with the other girlie-girls and watched the men scratch themselves to hell on the fence wire and ruin their backs lifting rolls of fencing up onto these tall racks. Yay, men, and the three macho chicks. You go. I'll be over here, cheerleading.

After 6 more hours (more or less), tour time finally rolled around! Note: there will be no photos from the tour because the woman who owns the place doesn't allow photos. Whatevs. Here are some photos from their website.

We got bused down to the area where the big cats and predators are kept. We split into tour groups - for leaders, you either got Bob and Tony, the volunteer wranglers, or Heather, the crazy possum-lover. I tried to scooch CC and Ish over toward Bob and Tony, but they were clueless to my motionings. So Crazy Heather it was.

Heather had an officious proprietary crazy animal lady thing going on. I was all too familiar with the personality type from my time voluteering at the County Animal Shelter. For instance, she kept insisting we stay "THREE FEET AWAY" from all the cages, even the very secure cages where the animals rested calm, sleepy and bored.

I guess she had some kind of a point, though, because a lot of those animals were dangerous killing machines.

I don't know if I have ever been as chilled as when the grizzly bear - about 4 feet high at the shoulder, maybe more - regarded me with its piggy little eyes. It viewed me with the casual disregard with which one might inspect a Chick-Fil-A while one has a steaming pizza before them. You could just see it thinking "Not now. Maybe later."

It paced around, its 3-inch claws clicking on the pavement, staring us down, taking the measure of our mettle. I was glad for the extra large-gauge chain link right about then.

There were also cheetahs, tigers, ligers. Honest to Napoleon Dynamite, there were Ligers - which Heather told us were very sad animals "Because they don't know what they are, how they should behave." Right, Heather. Thank you for your keen insights on animal genetics and psychology.

There were also wolves and coyotes and Mountain Lions, who were elegant and fierce and, like the Grizzly, seemed to look at me more as food than anything else.

It was all heart-breaking and confusing. The place is trying to do good, rescuing animals who have worked in movies or who have been raised by Michael Jackson-style idiots who think that a tiger cub is so cute and who suddenly end up with a 600 pound cat with razor-sharp teeth and a $1000 a month food bill.

I was torn between being captivated by the beauty and power of the animals, feeling sad for them being in cages, and being terrified at being THREE FEET from killing machines.

The worst part was the chimps. They have about 30 chimps, mostly rescued from animal laboratories, and those dudes just aren't right in the head. We had to run the gauntlet between their cages, where they spit on the unfortunate tour members who happened to be at the back of the line.

They made this unearthly whooping/crying/moaning sound. It sounded like the voices of those descending to hell. And it was LOUD. I don't know when I have heard something more heartbreaking and more terrifying.

CC, Ish and I all agreed that we were disturbed to the bone. We left quiet, somber and more than a little angry. Why are people so stupid? Why do they think that chimps are babies and lions and tigers and mountain lions are kitties that they can just snuggle with and play with, when in reality they are wild beasts who would be better off wild?

None of us had been fans of zoos before, but we vowed to never visit one again. It is just too horrible. I know that place is the best hope for animals whose lives were ruined by the idiocy and cruelty of humans, but the sounds of those chimps keeps ringing through my head.

The Raven Life List

My dear friend CC invented a new Life List today: Stuff I Have Done and Never Want to Do Again. Let's call it the Raven Life List ("Quoth the Raven: Nevermore"). Not quite as glamorous as some people's Life Lists, and certainly not sponsored by anyone, but worth considering nevertheless.

Get a haircut at Supercuts
Food poisoning from a suspect burrito
Be dumped for an ex-girlfriend
Have the ex-girlfriend come to a meeting I was leading - at my house
Dance with a guy who grabbed my boob
Break a high heel
Fart in a board meeting
Drop something valuable into a public toilet
Fly United Airlines
Have my car die on a freeway onramp
Pee my pants in public
Rent a room to a psycho
Be bullied in high school (hi, Jamie Lambert)
Fail a class
Be laid off
Deal with Charter Cable customer service
Eat leg of lamb
Lose my shoes in the mud
Have it rain for 28 days in a row
Live with an unmedicated person with bipolar disorder
Date someone who hated to brush their teeth
Have a landlord with boundary issues
Kill a rattlesnake
Be too cold to sleep
Go to a college on the quarter system
Lose an heirloom
Eat at Marie Callendars
Have the sewage back up in the yard
Go to small claims against idiots

Ok. Enough for now. You get the picture.

More on the Rear-View Life List

I was talking to my brother-in-law about my blog post on the Rear-View Life List.

He said "You've done so much. When I look at my list, there isn't anything on it except 'Have dinner with Liberace.' That's it."

I said "Hey, wait a minute, you've done ALL KINDS of interesting things. You were a roadie for Bill Graham Productions, after all."

We talked for a bit and realized that his list includes:
- Holding Wolfman Jack's head while he puked
- Flying in a helicopter into a crowd of 500,000 people
- Getting a ride from Chuck Berry in Chuck's golf cart

That's what I love about this project. In two minutes, we had three amazing life stories that came flooding back.

And then, there's this:

What's off my reverse life list

I found out that Dave had my reverse life list idea a long time ago. That does not make me feel stupid. Au contraire - it makes me feel great because it confirms that I am well-justified in having Dave as my not-so-secret blog crush.  (I plan on having my avatar marry his avatar and run away to Second Life, where they will live happily ever after, or as long as the Lindens last.) (Do people still do Second Life? It seems so 14 months ago).

ANYWAY...I am having a blast making my Reverse Life List. Every time I open my brain, something I did that was fun pops up. I recommend doing this - it's amazing what you remember, and how much cool stuff you have done without even realizing it.

So far I can cross off from my big Reverse Life List:

Fly in a hot air balloon

Ride a mule in Yosemite

Fly in a helicopter over Kauai

Walk a labyrinth

Take an award-winning photo

Build a Rose Parade Float

Pilot a helicopter (verrry briefly)
Pick macadamia nuts

Ride a recumbent tandem bike

See a horse being born

Drive a backhoe

Learn another language

Have the White House pastry chef make me dessert

Get a college degree
Volunteer on a presidential campaign

Make a good wine

Win a blue ribbon at the county fair
Drive halfway across the country

Be published on McSweeney's

Do the chicken dance

Drive sideways

Plant 20 kinds of sage in my yard
Climb a pyramid

Buy a recumbent bike
Roast my own coffee

Go to Oaxaca

Drive a Caterpillar

See Buck Owens at the Crystal Palace

Snorkel with sea turtles

Get paid to write full-time
Make beer
Play roulette in Vegas

Adopt a shelter dog

Start a food blog
Eat shave ice in Hawaii

Design a book

Get a big grin from Buddy Guy

Heal a very old wound

Hug chef Michel Richard
Go body surfing

Visit Washington DC

Study A Course in Miracles
Sail in a catamaran in high seas

Have Barack Obama answer one of my questions

Save a lot of trees

Go to a pro soccer game

Interview Anthony Bourdain

Protest George W. Bush in his presence
Get stopped by Secret Service (see above)

Be the 9th caller

Paddle a canoe with my dad

Have a peak moment

Go to chef school

Start a life blog

Manage a crew of amazing people

Go to baseball Spring Training

Marvel at the redwoods

Hike in Zion National Park with my dad

Jump off the Pismo pier
Watch fireworks from a yacht

Meet cycling legend Davis Phinney

Visit San Miguel Island
Be in the middle of a huge electrical storm

Help get a prisoner of conscience out of jail

Go to the Rose Parade
See a live condor

Ring in the new millennium
Play in the snow

Buy $250,000 worth of paper

Celebrate the Harmonic Convergence

See "Starry Night"

Read at a poetry festival

Dance on the lawn to Los Lobos

Course Marshal a pro cycling race

Read at BlogHer Community Keynote

Live by myself
See a meteor shower

Dance like a maniac to Koko Taylor

Write front page, above-the-fold story

Hang out in a yurt

See Half Dome

Protest a war

Interview a former first lady

Make mole negro
See a real autumn

Eat a grasshopper

Dance to the Neville Brothers

Go to NYC
See the Grateful Dead

Ride in a speed boat

Go canyoning
Be a bleacher bum

Celebrate Samhain among 500 pagans

Take a yoga class from Judith Lasater

March for civil rights

Go to a nude beach
Attend Catholic mass
See a full eclipse of the sun

Take the Chicago architectural boat tour

Shop at LA's Grand Central Market

Help land a multi-million dollar account

Climb a mountain

Thank a great teacher from elementary school

See Bruce Springsteen

Learn street fighting
Experience an earthquake

Speak on a BlogHer panel
March in a Mardi Gras parade

Hear a symphony that makes me cry
Receive laying on of hands

See John Lee Hooker in a tiny venue
Do improv comedy

Make a bully back down
Hug George Foreman

Get hysterical
Receive an answer to a prayer
Give an award-winning speech

Hear Brian Wilson play "Smile"

Meet Rick Bayless and thank him

Fall in love with opera

Hike the Pinnacles
Eat bananas I grew myself
Learn to weld
Visit the Carizzo Plains

See Dave Chappelle

Participate in important scientific research

Swim with the US. Men's Olympic Waterpolo team

Raise a flower crop and sell it

See the day when the Berlin Wall falls

My Reverse Life List

Maggie Mason and her amazing hair have this thing about Life Lists.

(Well, maybe just Maggie does, and she might have just brought her hair along for the ride. I do not know for a fact that she consulted her hair.)

The idea is that you make a big list of things you want to do before you die, and then you do them. Simple.

The only problem is that I am too lazy and not at all goal-oriented, so even when I make those kind of lists, I lose the paper, or I forget about it even if it is right there on the fridge, or I change my mind, or I put stuff on the list that I think sounds cool at the time, but who do I think I'm fooling with the surfing lessons? I can't WALK without spraining both ankles.

So, I am doing a reverse life list. I am doing cool things first, and then crossing them off. This saves confusion and disappointment. Rather, it is entirely satisfying. Ah, one more item off my list! Why look, everything is off my list!

Hooray! Done! Until the next cool thing comes along that I can write down and then immediately cross off.  Instant gratification.

Reverse Life List:
1. Washing my hair in a waterfall.