50 is a big number. Happy 600th month birthday to we mid-level gen-x-ers. I’m lucky to have shared many of those years with a lot of folks doing a lot of some smart, some not so smart, bust most of them helluva adventure fun things. A half century is no joke. I’ve got friends that didn’t make it to this point. 8 of my not huge high school class is gone. By now, the birthclass of 1973 has gained and lost friends, parents, pets, siblings, relationships, money; learned more about resilience than our 20 something selves would have deemed possible. And we’ve got opinions from the hard knocks lessons of life well lived. Here are some of mine: wishlists, thoughts (ie verbal ways to tick off others), my missive is to write one thing that’s hopefully in some way meaningful each week for the next 52 weeks.

Here goes …

I’ve done a lot of cool things; lived a charmed life. Here are some of the unchecked travel and materialistic and maybe silly but it’s my list items:

1. Experience the northern lights. There’s nothing I want to just “see”; what’s epic in that? As in stand outside, feeling the cold on my cheeks in Iceland head up witness feel breathe the aurora borealis in its majestic green skylit fury;
2. Attend a Cyndi Lauper and Lady Gaga and J Lo (OMG – please let that all happen in one venue – cavetch!) concert;
3. Dogsledding (not riding, actual at the controls – 1/2 day, not the Iditarod, be realistic!);
4. Attend a legit professional not just back alley bar brawl boxing match;
5. African safari – maybe stay in the giraffe hotel; we can share eggs bene;
6. Meet and hang out legit with Lamar Sorrento (and buy another of his amazing creations to grace my walls);
7. Dinner wine visit to Kosta Brown;
8. Live for at least a month on the Upper West Side of Central Park;
   • Dine at EMP and Rao’s during said residence.
9. Swim in Versace’s tile pool in Miami Beach;
10. Become a Walrus (jump into the ice hole water, scurry to the hut for vodka shots, do over and claim your bragging rights);
11. Own and actually wear an Oscar de la Renta dress.

And here are the meaningful things list:

1. Get my kids to a good adulthood place – preferably through college happy, feeling proud of the awesome people they are, safe and debt free and hopefully still wanting to spend some time with mom;
2. Marry Chuck;
3. Live someplace where the beach is my backyard, where I don’t have to deal with snakes and that my kids want to visit frequently;
4. Be reliable to the people I love most.
5. Compliment people more; a lot more. It costs nothing and can make someone’s day. And call people out when they body shame. You gotta extinguish your insecure carelessness, ruining someone else’s day just cuz’ you can misunderstanding, conflict based hurtfulness.
6. Channel my inner Modern Family Gloria. She’s stunning, loving, empathetic, respects family, has a backbone and is hella honest funny.
7. Attend Venice Carnivale and Pamplona’s Running with the Bulls (okay, maybe not the last one because I hate bull fights – total unfair don’t get the sport. Of course the bull loses. You stab the hell out of it and then say “go!”).

And here is the DON’T want list:

1. To skydive. WTF people? Why?
2. To ever again have a ginormous house. I had that. It was always literally always part too hot or part too cold, answered none of life’s mysteries other than people don’t need giant houses, and metaphorically stagnant;
3. To go on a pilgrimage. Everyone seems to be going on a pilgrimage. As if vacation isn’t cool enough. Travel IS my pilgrimage. I’m the unabashed tourist: pass me the salt rimmed margarita on the beach or the baileys coffee apres ski, let me sit in the comfort of my belief in science and a higher power tbd, and stay in a schwank fun place with fun people, snorkel or ski or bike, enjoying the roadside eateries traversing my way in parts previously unknown.
4. Be a burden; I don’t want to live a day more than I have to when the promise of fun times are over. Please let that not be for a long not just dog years time.
5. Remind myself often that most people are good, even when dealing with jagoffs.
6. Remind myself that the jagoffs are not worth your time. It’s okay to cut off bad people guillotine style. If they only care if what they have is better than what you have? Discard. If they are the human version of tramp stamp gold diggers looking to “land” a man? Discard. If their fakeness, meanness, patheticness, whateverness is based in some insecurity you have no inkling to solve or feed into? Discard. If you cannot trust them? Discard. Life is short, choose your company wisely because they speak volumes about you.
7. Never ever stop loving tiki bars.