On Showtime's The Big C, when Laura Linney's character finds out she has cancer and only a certain amount of time left, she promptly transforms from the kind of woman who would use a doily to the kind who does cartwheels down the halls of the school where she teaches, orders only drinks and desserts at restaurants, and fakes suicide to teach her son a lesson (you'd have to see it to get it). This got me thinking that I would do all the of following:

1) Live by the ocean

2) Amass the most banging photography collection on the block and take more pictures myself

3) Fill my home with a freakish amount of animals--every one from Noah's ark, in fact

4) Finish reading every book, watching every movie, and completing every writing project on the intimidatingly long list that hides under my notebooks and grows by the day

5) Hire David Bowie's stylist 

6) Don a Marge Simpson 'do for a day

7) Wear a wizard hat for no apparent reason

 
8)  Eat only sweets and cheese

9) Do the Funky Chicken on pretty much all occasions 

10) Finally wave to my neighbor across the courtyard. I mean, come on, we both know she could probably read most levels of an eye chart from there

11) Take up painting and force my three best friends to attend the "gallery openings" in my kitchen dressed to the nines

12) Allow myself to laugh at all the innappropriate, inexplicable times that it occurs to me to do so

13) Find the presumably homeless man who made me cry in the subway last week by belting out the most gorgeous rendition of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" that I've ever heard, tell him what he does for people, and then offer him a home--if he doesn't mind the animals

14) Finally write and perform that one-woman show

15) Build a shrine to Marty Skoble, the man who just knew that 5th graders could get poetry

16) Do all the public speaking and public everything that I've been too shy for thus far

17) Shave my head once just to see what it looks like underneath all that hair

18) See and do abso-f-ing-lutely everything in the most abso-f-ing-lutely over-the-top manner possible

19) Skinny dip in someone else's kiddie pool

20) Execute that nifty poodle haircut I've been visualizing on a real poodle

21) Apologize to, well, that's my secret

22) Take all those travels I have planned, just writing my way through the world

23) Ride The Wonder Wheel at Coney Island one last time

24) Force everyone I love to participate in one mammoth game of Charades

25) Do something startlingly kind for as many people as possible and then call up every single person who has ever done something startlingly kind for me and thank them…by offering to send them a wizard hat

What's on your list?