Goals, Aspirations, Dreams, and Fantasies


Chichen Itza.  One down, a lot more to go.

Chichen Itza. One down, a lot more to go.

Random Observation/Comment #111: Ambition and curiosity drives me.  I’m not exactly an adrenaline junkie looking for the next extreme sport to almost die from, nor am I a millionaire thrill seeker spending all of his money experiencing crazy things; I am just a man with goals, aspirations, dreams, and fantasies.  Many of the goals are very short term and involve completing tasks at hand to make myself feel productive for the day.  Long term goals exist as well, but they are much more reasonable and can probably be achieved in the next few years.  The aspirations are for my long term career outlooks and accomplishments that occur in the next decade or so.  My dreams are what I deem as possible, but will require a lifetime of hardship or a whole lot of luck to come true.   My fantasies are things that will probably never happen, but their existence makes me happy and keeps me wishing.

During the web2.0 era a few years ago, a site was created called 43things.com.  It was a site to share your goals while reading about others.  I consider this site the exact opposite of grouphug.us, which is one of my favorites for confessions, but requires somewhat of a “twisted release through the pain of others” to read.  Anyway, I hope my list inspires others to live life the same.

Goals:

  1. Finish Master’s
  2. Stop procrastinating
  3. Take care of parents
  4. Narrow down primetime TV shows because they take up too much time in my life (House, The Office, Heroes, Dexter, Colbert Report, 24, Californiacation, 30 Rock)
  5. Learn to write more in Chinese
  6. Learn to speak more fluently in Japanese, Mandarin, German, and Spanish
  7. Get better at cooking
  8. Review more restaurants
  9. Finish the comic book
  10. Finish the manga
  11. Go sky diving
  12. Write more poems
  13. Finish my bottle cap collection of beers
  14. Read more books
  15. Write the backpacking itinerary
  16. Document my backpacking through Europe
  17. Dominate Travbuddy like XDrive (www.travbuddy.com)
  18. Ski the alps
  19. Don’t die while skiing the alps

Aspirations:

  1. Fall in love again
  2. Get married (hopefully after the love thing)
  3. Find a career with flexible hours, low stress, and high pay (maybe this should be a fantasy or at least a dream)
  4. Live in NYC
  5. Publish a book (autobiography, memoirs, novel, etc)
  6. See the Northern Lights
  7. Make money from photography
  8. Write about drinking expensive wines
  9. Get an MBA
  10. Start a company
  11. Go on a road-trip with my close friends
  12. Save someone’s life – change it for the better forever
  13. Own a dog and play in the little dog park with them – yay!
  14. Conquer my fears

Dreams:

  1. Visit all 7 continents
  2. See all 7 wonders of the world (all of them listed on Wikipedia which makes them like 50 based on different organizations)
  3. Travel to at least 50 countries
  4. Make my first million by the time I’m 27
  5. Eat at almost 80% of all restaurants in The City
  6. Early retirement
  7. Make a living traveling and writing
  8. Learn to fly a plane
  9. Write a series of motivational posters

Fantasies:

  1. Travel to space
  2. Have an orgy in space (obviously) – girl majority, please.
  3. Time travel to change that one moment in my life…
  4. Get bitten by a spider and swing through the city fighting crime.  I would, of course, struggle with internal conflicts and the balance of a love life with a superhero secret, but this is the price I am willing to pay to shoot web out of my wrists.  “With great power comes great responsibility.”
  5. I am Tony Stark.
  6. I am Hiro Nakamura (without the whole saving the world business)
  7. Actually see the flying spaghetti monster create the universe in a drunken mess
  8. Halle Berry from Swordfish + Jessica Alba from Sin City + Me
  9. Super strength, super speed, x-ray vision, flying, and a cape
  10. I have all of Dirk Diggler’s assets 😉
  11. Jumping out of a plane at high altitude to catch up with a parachute, and put it on just in time to save my life
  12. I am an International Man of Mystery or The Secret Asian Man (I guess this is more of a fact than a fantasy)
  13. Build everything in Back to the Future – I’ve wanted that hover-board for soooo long
  14. Shove the blue pill up Morpheus’s ass and hope I don’t turn into an Agent – bad luck.
  15. Lucid dream forever (I could be now, and just thinking about that being true makes me happy)
  16. Be remembered forever for doing something really awesome or really outrageous.  Like invent the hover-board or first man to have a threesome with Jessica Alba and Halle Berry in space.
  17. World happiness (however this works out, cool beans).
  18. Do one-handed, one-finger pushups in a capsule with 100G forces for years straight as training to fight an ugly, short blue guy.  When I get angry, my hair sticks up and turns blond while a glowing aura surrounds me.  The dialogue lasts forever.
  19. Kick Yoda’s ass in a light saber fight.
  20. I am a bounty hunter who has really bad luck with collecting money, so I must resort to eating bell peppers and beef or shitake mushrooms all the time.
  21. I wear a red trench coat with blonde spiked hair and really cool round sunglasses.  I love donuts and … this was an awesome series.  Love and Peace!
  22. I can pinch your neck and kill you in an instant.  Stop making fun of my pointy ears and flawless logic.
  23. I am Jack Bauer.  So badass.
  24. When I do a pushup, I am not lifting myself up, but pushing the Earth down.  When I was born, roundhouse kick deaths increased 13,000 percent.  There would be no chin behind my beard, only another fist.  I can divide by zero.  I can count to infinity – twice.

Most importantly: Stay healthy (or else none of these really matter) and never stop learning (or else none of these really matter).

By the way, making up this list was immensely fun and really relieved a lot of stress.

~See Lemons Start the Adventure