Have y’all heard of Laura Vanderkam’s “List of 100 Dreams” idea? I hadn’t, but I have now, and I love it.
To me, it feels like a bucket list, but better: the items don’t have to feel realistic, or things you can only do if you put the time aside. They can be big and scary and feel impossible.
I don’t usually do things like this, but one of my goals for this year was to put myself in unknown situations more. And now that I’ve done it, I can’t recommend it enough. Let’s get uncomfy together.
Here’s my list of 100 dreams:
_Note: 1 – 42 are professional-ish, 42 – 69 are personal-ish, and the last 31 are all experiential. I’m occasionally updating with a_ ✅ when a dream has become a reality. (last update December 2019 – added 4 more checks!).
- Write this entire list with 100 legitimate dreams ✅
- Create a line of social justice-y greeting cards ✅
- Write and illustrate a children’s book
- Publish 3 books, then keep writing more ✅
- Keynote a conservative conference/event
- Record and release an EP
- Translate _A Guide to Gender_ into 5 languages
- Perform/speak on every continent (yes, especially Antarctica)
- Perform/speak in every U.S. state (I’m at 49⁄50, and looking at you, Alaska — I’ll do a free show if anyone at UofA is reading this!)
- Give Ellen DeGeneres a hug
- Give away 100,000 copies of A Guide to Gender
- Host SNL
- Open a vegan restaurant/food truck
- Create a fun audio book version of A Guide to Gender (25K and counting!)
- Perform a show or give a talk at all the schools I personally attended
- Have a book on the NYT Best Sellers List (organically, not by buying my way in)
- Collaborate with three different activists on three different projects in a year ✅
- Earn enough money to pay all my bills doing Good (and no freelancing) ✅
- Appear on a Late Night show talking about something positive
- Create and curate an activist/artist retreat collaborative camp thing
- Hire someone to read [and respond to most of] my email
- Write a column for The New Yorker
- Speak at Creating Change
- Launch the Uncopyright Movement ✅
- Serve on the Board of some cool national organization I love ✅
- Publish a piece in a print magazine ✅
- Have the Genderbread Person translated into at least 7 languages ✅
- Shift my income to be primarily from writing (not speaking/performing) ✅
- Work less than an average 14 hours a day in a year ✅
- Make a documentary inspired by and following the development and reaction one of my projects
- Publish a book of poetry and prose
- Tell jokes on Comedy Central
- Get a studio space that I can share with collaborators
- Teach at a university ✅
- Finish writing a novel
- Go one week without receiving any hate mail or hate campaign related garbage
- Write and produce an off-broadway show (or produce one of the ones I’ve already written)
- Create a social justice conference
- Give a talk/performance in a language other than English (German, Russian, Portuguese, or French)
- Write a screenplay
- Create and sustain jobs for at least two wonderful, passionate people for a year
- Convince people “social justice comedian” is a thing, and that it makes perfect sense ✅
- Build a house for myself
- Learn French and Portuguese
- Yoga with regularity and consistency
- Paint a mural in Austin
- Become 100% debt-free
- Cook for friends on a regular basis
- Halve my possessions once more, for the last time (probably)
- Pay someone to do my taxes
- Get a PhD
- Find a secret place in the world where I can escape and sabbatical (and tell no one)
- Attend a culinary school academy type thing
- Brew my own beer ✅
- Get a puppy and love it to death (after he’s lived a long, happy life, of course) ✅(Chewbacca! & Ghost!)
- Drink more wine, more tea, and less coffee ✅
- Learn to be less afraid of money
- Fund a scholarship for students “who otherwise would not consider higher education an option”
- Get surgery on my eyeballs so I can see better
- Actually live in Hawaii near my fam for at least a little bit, if nothing else but to confirm my theory that I’d get island fever despite all the wonderfulness
- Get braces or whatever is necessary to straighten my teeth so I can chew better ✅
- Grow a garden
- Build a motorcycle
- Develop a family of friends in Austin, or wherever I live next ✅
- Live abroad for at least six months
- Continue finding healthy ways to mitigate the stress of this life I’ve chosen and go a year without asking for permission to smile.
- Spend a month with no contact with any other human beings
- Spend a month touring/performing/speaking every day ✅
- Spend a month following the 253 vows of the Vinaya
- Swim in the Sea of Stars in the Maldives
- Fly in a helicopter
- NYE in NYC
- St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin
- Scuba dive the Great Blue Hole
- Road trip around the great lakes (including seeing a movie at the Cherry Bowl drive-in) ✅
- Surf the cliffs of Moher
- Go on a safari and shoot a rhino (with my camera)
- Read Anna Karenina ✅
- Ride a train from Austin to Mexico City
- Visit Flores Island, Indonesia when the Lake of Old People is blue, the Lake of Young Men is green, and Maiden’s Lake is red
- Do a backflip out of an airplane (ideally with a parachute attached to me) ✅
- Ride in a hot air balloon (ideally in Anatolia in Turkey)
- Go to the Sasquatch Music Festival
- Climb the Great Pyramids and walk around the Sphinx ✅
- See Zhangye Danxia in China
- Buy a van/bus/station wagon and live/work out of it on the road for a while
- See Flight of the Conchords live
- Climb Mount Roraima
- Literally walk 500 miles to see someone I love
- Go to Burning Man
- Swing on the “End of the World” Swing in Baños, Ecuador
- Ride an elephant, ideally one named “Bubbles” (but I’m not picky) ✅[Not Bubbles, Meena]
- Spelunk the caves of Hang Ken in Vietnam
- Walk from the Shire to Mordor (or, rather, the real-life places in NZ those locations were shot in)
- Oktoberfest in München
- Walk the Tunnel of Love with a коханець in Klevan, Ukraine
- Experience zero gravity, ideally in space
- See Mike Birbiglia live ✅
- Attend the World Cup
- Visit the Himalayas and a Zen Buddhist monastery in the region
That’s it. That’s a lot. If you want to make any of these dreams a reality with me, or have a tip/inside track for one, I’m all ears.