Labour Day Weekend Bucket Dump

A combination of rainfall from outside and my pooch snoring at the foot of my bed woke me up this morning. It rained buckets overnight. I would have went back to sleep if I wasn’t immediately seized by overpowering leg cramps soon afterward. I couldn’t think of much else to do since 5:30 AM to quietly take my mind away from the pain, except to write. I realize that it is somewhat ironic that I am finding myself starting off this day stuck in bed, trying to unlock and unfold myself from a fetal position, because it is my birthday. It will be nothing significant or monumental. It’s forecasted that it will be drizzling and gloomy all day, and all the people I’d like to share this day with have their own long weekend plans, or are out of town or province, or out of the country. It’s the kind of day where I definitely feel I’ve grown a lot older, but not much wiser or better; hardly worth celebrating. The only special thing I can think doing is to try to move soundly enough to make some coffee and my breakfast of choice, and to tour around the world a bit from the armchair: reading online travel guides, and articles and posts from the Quebecois and European news sources*. Beyond that, my motivation and speculation for activities for the rest of the day is as dull and grey as the sky is now. All I know is that suppressing aches and pains, being forced to sit still, staring at screens, and perusing lines of text isn’t the ideal way to spend this day.

But hold on a second . . . I just caught sight of a blog entry from Tim Ferriss. It is about bucket lists. It occurs to me that I don’t officially have one. Given that it is my birthday, it should be the gift I give to myself. If I can do nothing but sit around, retreat into my own head, and write, I might as well devote some time and serious thought and focus to this instead of being depressed and watching it rain buckets. I won’t be sharing it: it’s too personal. I will divulge that:

·         I’ll shoot for about a 100 things. That alone could be challenging enough to be classified as list item # 1. It was hard enough just to think of one thing for the  "Before I Die I Want to . . ." Wall I mentioned earlier.

·         Skydiving won’t be on there. It's a ridiculously cliché thing that a lot of other people put on theirs. A bucket list, in my mind, is about the things you want to do to make you feel alive; not doing things that would kill you in such a way that there would be nothing left of you except stuff that can only be scooped up and put in a bucket. I had to return to this point to edit this a bit. It's not like I'm advising against it to those who really want to try it out, just make sure that it's the last thing  on your list . . . unless you are a real asshole to everyone, then please do us all a favour, and make it the first thing to do on your bucket list.

·         No experimenting with drugs, nor anything else illegal, will be on there. I prefer lucidity, and not risking wasting any of this precious lifetime I have left behind bars.

·         It won’t involve any buying anymore gadgets and or computing technology. It will be about shifting from the virtual world to more engagement with the real one.

If anything, I hope it sets me on a course of being more energized and motivated for the day and beyond, and not victimizing myself with too much boredom during this day of solitude.

*- Aside from the actual news, I do it more so to help me retain some of my secondary language skills. Reading the translated versions of my own blog entries, on subjects that are of interest to me, and which stem from my own original thinking, is another useful learning and retention technique that I also exploit. I’m still lousy at oral communication: in that I usually don’t easily comprehend what is being spoken to me. Transmission OK; reception bad.