2024 summer bucket list
reviving my long-dead motivation to be a multifaceted individual who has intelligent thoughts
in an attempt to do some fast growing up so I no longer feel like a 14 year old adult (and so I won’t feel like an idiotic 21 year college sophomore), I’m making some 6-months-into-the-new-year New Year’s Resolutions! or I guess a summer bucket list? whatever you wanna call it, here are the things I would like to work on before summer ends so I don’t feel like such a loser in the fall. thanks for reading.
continue learning Portuguese and become conversationally proficient. I recently got super into genealogy. this involved discovering the depressingly unkempt and overgrown Shockoe Hill Cemetery in downtown Richmond — riddled with lidless mausoleums and a small clearing in the woods outside of it’s walls that houses a stack of at least a dozen mattresses (none of my business) — and the small community of Portuguese immigrants that settled here in the mid to late 1800s. through my research, I discovered a history of revolutionaries (the cool kind) and literal pirates (also the cool kind) in my ancestral line (side note: discovering that after my thrice great-grandfather was extradited back to Portugal to be tried, and presumably executed for his insurgent tendencies, he hijacked a ship and came back to America and never went back, is now one of my favorite things to talk about, hence the yapping.) all this to say, I’m trying to learn Portuguese again. I’ve also started wearing my great grandmother’s wedding band again, but that’s neither here nor there.
read some good books. I was one of those kids that was super into the Percy Jackson series and was an overachiever with my elementary school’s “Battle of the Books” team (I don’t know if this was a regional thing or not, but please let me know if your school had a B.O.B. team.) I even had my own library card by age 6. my constant literary engagement ended once I became a preteen, and all I ever seemed to care about was 30 year old men in bands (like, duh, it was 2015.) once COVID hit and I had been in high school for a few years and my fake emo adolescent suffering had become real psychologically tortured 16 year old girl suffering, my misery brought me to places that no teenage girl locked in her bedroom alone without any real friends to save her should go: Girl, Interrupted on constant rotation. the amount of times I reread that book and rewatched that movie should grant me a lifetime as Lisa Rowe’s roommate. anyway, as much as I have my qualms with Girl, Interrupted and the way it shaped so many teenage girls’ views on mental illness, I have it to thank for reigniting my love for reading. but I still don’t read nearly as much as I would like so PLEASE feel free to recommend some of your favorite reads. I still have a 17 year old’s taste so some of my favorites are Perks of Being a Wallflower (the essential), Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, and Janet Fitch’s White Oleander.
learn to drive. not necessarily get my license, just be able to drive if needed. I’m going to be fully and completely honest here. the only reason I’ve started to care about getting my license now is because my 50 year old bipolar cousin with a “everything I own is for sale” mindset just purchased a red 1995 Camaro convertible and I am utterly in love with it. when he let me see the interior, I saw in the back seat was a half empty bottle of Hollywood Playboy cologne that he SWORE belonged to the old man that he bought the car from. I almost believed him until I remembered that exact scent combined with the smell of pot in my grandma’s bathroom when I used it after him at Christmas last year. is it a bit ridiculous that a 30 year old car that I definitely cannot afford is the driving force in me getting my license 4 years late? no, I actually don’t think so at all.
this is all I have at the moment. hoping to become better and smarter and more beautifuller ASAP. will update.