Kicking the Bucket
Living laughing loving listmaking.
My bucket list once landed me a job interview, a date, and an admiring letter from a stranger.
There’s nothing novel or particularly interesting about the concept of a bucket list, but there must have been something novel about mine. Maybe how uninhibited (you could also say unhinged) it was in its innocence, specificity, and enthusiasm—as far as from jaded as you could imagine. I started this “life list” (of course I refused to call it a bucket list; hope you can feel my eye roll from here) when I was sixteen, writing entries on little slips of paper and storing them in a mason jar. At some point, the list migrated to my old blog, where I faithfully tended it for all of college and into my earliest twenties. For a brief, exhilarating time, the life list took on a life of its own, generating opportunities and conversations I didn’t ask for or expect. It reinforced the conceit of a bucket list itself: that anything was possible.
My list was an equal opportunity curator of typical ambitions and trivial aesthetic pursuits or experiences. I was just as invested in, say, “wearing overalls one more time (#33)” as I was in “seeing Europe (#49).” As I grew up and got more rooted in my actual life, I forgot about my life list. “Painting a room on the spur of the moment in the middle of the night (#9)” didn’t have much connection to what I was actually doing in the middle of the night, which was waking up a thousand times with a breastfeeding baby. My bent for bookmarking minor experiences or laying claim to a moment never faded though. Is it too earnest to quote Annie Dillard here? I’m going to anyway, because if there’s one thing I am, for better or for worse, it’s earnest. “How we spend our days,” Dillard famously wrote, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” This philosophy has always felt instinctual to me; it’s why the details matter so much. Big days eventually become a blur, but the small and sensory-rich ordinary moments stay with us.
I’m making different kinds of lists these days. “Summer Fun Lists” for my kids. Gas-in-my-tank lists to baptize myself in the goodness of right now. Thematic constraints for getting dressed (see last year’s “Safari Summer”) for granting permission to play. All of them are about pinning down time and my experience of it—like butterflies or pressed flowers. “I’m intrigued by the practice of historicizing our lives in real time, of giving our eras keywords and themes, containers in which to grow,” says journalist Melissa Kirsch for The New York Times. “Years as numbers seep into one another; branded eras maintain distinction. The more specific, the more memorable.”
Appropriately, I’m writing this now dressed in a plum-colored pencil skirt that I used to wear all the time in college. Back then, I was cosplaying the kind of high-energy, accomplished woman I wanted to be; despite all the years in between, this morning, I still feel like I’m cosplaying, just an old version of myself. A skirt is just a skirt, but it can also be shorthand for ideas and feelings and goals, a portal of sorts to a different world. This, I think, is why I put “wear overalls one more time” on my life list. Marking down the mundane, the minute, sharpens our focus or aim so we don’t miss life itself.
TBD on what I’ll do with my life list now that I’ve recently rediscovered it. Part of the choice to call it a “life list” was a vow to letting it guide all my life; part of growing up is realizing what ideals are okay to turn loose.
Number 130 on the list was “sing auld lang syne on New Year’s Eve”—a romantic wish surely seeded by many, many childhood viewings of It’s a Wonderful Life. Several years after my life list had faded from any significant role in my life, two of my friends brought guitars as a surprise to the NYE dinner party I was hosting. At the right moment, they led all of us in Auld Lang Syne and it was even more moving and tender than I imagined when I put it on the list—the intimacy of good friends, the wistfulness of the year’s close, the love from being so known and indulged. This was the list at its best: bringing me and others out of our ordinary lives and closer toward the kind of meaningful moment we all long to share.
But I’d be remiss to not also share some of the list at its worst. Read on for a few of the more embarrassing entries and until next time, happy summer. If you make any kind of aspirational or seasonal list of your own, I’d love to hear about it. Truly.
No. 136: sleep for 48 hours straight
What exactly was I hoping to achieve here? A medically-induced coma? An event so traumatic or a period of sleep deprivation so intense that my only recourse was to sleep for two days straight? There’s a real flavor of hibernation happening in this one, maybe even a touch of Depression Lite, who can say.
No. 188: shave my legs outside
Bizarre, but unfortunately still on-brand. A pointless goal based solely on the ~ vibe ~, sign me right up. An image immediately springs to mind: a woman with brunette hair piled artfully on top of her head, reclining in a clawfoot tub stationed (inexplicably) in a field of wildflowers, turrets of bubbles rising in the air, one smooth, elegant leg peeping out from the bubbles. Did this vision come from an early-aughts Anthropologie catalog (very plausible) or did my brain just Midjourney it? Technically, I suppose I’ve checked this off: a janky outdoor shower in Alaska, where I routinely shaved my legs as a private act of resistance in my grungy wilderness camp counselor summer. Spiritually, the experience I once aspired to is… still out there.
No. 133: sleep in a silk tent
“Closest you’re gonna get is nylon,” advises my pragmatic brother-in-law.
No. 38: own a big dog. maybe an Irish setter, or a chocolate lab. or bigger.
Or bigger??? Since size was clearly the focus here, let’s acknowledge the biggest issue with this entry which is that I am not a dog person. Never have been either, which would make this aspiration a real mystery if it weren’t for the obnoxiously cliché backstory: pretty sure I was dating a guy with a dog. Score one for easily swayed.
No. 172: motorcycle through South America
Totally reasonable goal for a girl who had never ridden a motorcycle and never left the country before. Tall stack of obstacles aside, the real hold-up would have been my clumsy relationship with a clutch.
No. 116: find someone in my life that i will always will be ready to leave at a moment’s notice and go anywhere with them
Cringe wasn’t a concern back when I wrote this, but wow it is the very definition of it. Sure, the core of this desire isn’t anything to be ashamed about. Finding a connection with another person that’s compelling enough to permanently come along with them for the ride is essentially what marriage is. Wanna get coffee / wanna go on a hike / wanna climb a water tower / wanna go to Target / wanna buy a house / wanna have a baby / wanna go to Target / forever and ever amen. But the language kills me. It’s practically begging to be reblogged on a sappy sub-universe of Tumblr and honestly, I’d like to have been a littler cooler than this.
current status
reading :: Empire of Pain (Patrick Radden Keefe) // If you’ve visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you likely contemplated the Egyptian Temple of Dendur in a vast room flooded with light from a beautiful, enormous slanted wall of windows. This awe-inspiring space was once called The Sackler Wing—one of many, many museums and higher institutions around the world stamped with the Sackler family name. Empire of Pain tells the story of how the Sackler name got there—and why it’s gone now. Round of applause for Patrick Radden Keefe who turned a stunning amount of investigative reporting into a gripping portrait of the secretive, ultra-wealthy family responsible for creating OxyContin and, arguably, the opioid crisis itself. (The patriarch’s capacity, ambition, genius, and audacity alone will shock you.) It reads like a novel—an infuriating one!—but is devastatingly true.
cooking :: Buffalo Tuna Salad // I famously hate lunch—thinking about it, packing it for anyone, making it for myself. Thank you, Mallory Corum, for sharing a lunch recipe that looked easy and enticing enough to immediately stir me to action. It represents the trifecta of a perfect at-home lunch: quick, composed of ingredients I have, healthy. My suggestion is to increase the Buffalo sauce (spicier is better), pile it on a bed of greens, have a little toast on the side, and eat it outside feeling extremely pleased with your virtuous choices.
reading :: “Into Thin Airpods” (Defector) // A delightful, relatable whodunit tale for anyone who has ever lost their AirPods or lives in the ever-present fear of doing so. Also contains the funniest descriptor of AirPods I have ever read.
listening :: Backhand Slice, a low-key playlist from Jivan Davé for kicking around the kitchen after work with a cocktail in hand. / I Don’t Miss You — J.P. Saxe. Reminiscent of John Mayer in the best way. / Neighborhood — Evangeline. I like these sweet, sappy lyrics, okay. / Otero War — Caveman. Needed to get out of a rut and this new-to-me album did the trick. / You Were My Girl — Palmas. Sounds like crying into your tiki drink late one night at an outdoor bar, island breeze ruffling palm trees against an inky blue sky. / bar seats only — Fantastic dinner party playlist from Kaylan Whitaker.
reading :: “How to Make Friends” (The New Atlantis) // Likely we have all consumed our fair share of doom and gloom perspectives about the increasingly disconnected, digital world we live in. This insightful, bracing, and yet somehow cheerful guide isn’t that. It faces the woes of our time squarely, but then offers some very practical steps for moving toward connection, toward the tangible, toward community. I love Coffey’s smart piece and her lithe, precise writing. (In fact, there’s a bit in here I’ve straight up lifted as a mantra of sorts for life right now.)
loving :: Turkish towels // If you will spend any time traipsing down to a pool or the beach this summer, just go ahead and trade out your terry cloth beach towels for super lightweight Turkish towels instead. They dry rapidly, pack up tiny, can be tied around your waist as a sarong if needed, and your small children can wrap up in them and walk home without tripping one million times on the dragging tail corner of a thick, damp towel.
loving :: Time to Indi-go // Flawed name aside (the color is not remotely close to indigo!!), this seasonal blue nail polish from Sally Hansen has been an unexpected hit. A muddy, milky mid-blue, the hue is more like chambray, or maybe the Atlantic on a cloudy day. It’s from Sally Hansen’s Insta-Dri line which blessedly lives up to its name and provides thick, glossy coverage in a few quick swipes. 10/10.
contemplating :: “A Color of the Sky” (Tony Hoagland) // Hanging on to this poem by one of my favorite poets. Really, you’ll have to read the whole thing, but: “What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle. / What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel. / What I thought was an injustice / turned out to be a color of the sky.”
the real feel
“Vibe” has taken our vocabulary hostage, mine included. Once a relic from the groovy 60s, “vibe(s)” reappeared in the mid-90s and really skyrocketed in 2021. I remember becoming aware of the word’s sudden ubiquity—I even linked a New Yorker article about it in this very newsletter—but in the passage of time since, I find myself saying it more and more frequently. I’m a writer. I should do better. Yet —texting a friend about a protein shake I made the other day, it is not an exaggeration to say I felt desperate to describe the drink as having “faint cheesecake vibes.” After wrestling with myself to use literally any other word, I landed on flavor instead, but unhappily. Vibes felt right. It feels right so often! This, of course, is how people put on contentment pounds after settling down with a partner or how last babies hold onto their pacis for whole years past a well-intended cut-off or how reading chairs become Clothes Chairs. We all just wanna vibe.
gas in my tank
Watching my husband play tennis / pleated pants / Boston ferns / spring mix (yes, the lettuces) / Buffalo sauce / “britches” as a term / certain old BMWs / the return of step-sitting season / splits, as a practice / the breeze, the breeze, the BREEZE / cold wine on a Sunday afternoon / eating strawberries with everything / scent of honeysuckle on a run / dressing monochromatically when I don’t know what else to try / praying out loud really quick as a pivot / hot sauce (all of them) / buying tablecloths from the thrift store so I don’t have to be precious about them / tomato red / a personal quest for billowy
Until next time — sweat yourself drenched at least once, make a shrub with cheap summer berries, take someone you love to Dairy Queen for a dipped cone.