Filed under: The Me's I Could Have Been | Tags: Google, hiking, indoor girl, Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, life, mountain climbing, outdoor girl, Titanic
Kate Winslet's indoor girl.
Jack: You ever, uh, you ever been to Wisconsin?
Rose: What?
Jack: Well, they have some of the coldest winters around. I grew up there, near Chippewa Falls. I remember when I was a kid, me and my father, we went ice fishing out on Lake Wissota. Ice fishing is, you know, where you…
Rose: I know what ice fishing is!
Jack: Sorry. You just seem like, you know, kind of an indoor girl. (Emphasis mine)
I failed the flexed arm hang during the Presidential Fitness test in grade school.
Anybody else remember this dialogue between Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic? I remember it distinctly, because I blushed when I heard it. Like Kate Winslet’s character Rose, I am a total indoor girl–complete with the translucently pale white skin, the bustiness, and the propensity to trip and fall at inappropriate times.
No doubt if I had been on that ship that fateful (and fictional) night, I would have been dangling off the side of the Titanic. But, before Jack had a chance to decide whether or not to save my rather large and approaching-middle-aged ass, heck, before I could even get the words “help, help” out of my throat, I’d likely be a goner. Because my palms tend to sweat in stressful situations, and I have absolutely NO upper body strength (I still remember the shame of failing the flexed arm hang in grade school during the Presidential Fitness exams.) So kerplunk! I would have been the first casualty of that tragic voyage. The girl who fell off the Titanic before it sank.
So imagine my surprise this week when I found out I have a doppelganger in the world who spends her life outside in the elements. She is a naturalist. She has sailed across the Atlantic in a 6 person boat. She has climbed a live volcano. She has hiked, biked, paddled, climbed, camped and skied across the U.S., Asia, Africa, Central America, and Canada.
She is the consummate outdoor girl.
If I were an outdoor girl, I would have climbed Mount Kenya. (For those who know me, try not to laugh too hard.)
Now, I have made attempts to be more of an outdoor girl. A couple of years ago, I climbed to the top of Mount Battie in Camden, Maine (all 780 feet of it) and had to descend on my butt.
In my defense, it was a big, bald rock that was pretty steep in places.
And I do have a tendency to fall.
To put my accomplishment in perspective, a couple of years ago, she (my alter ego) climbed more than 17,000 feet to the top of Mount Kenya.
So I guess she wins the doggie biscuit.
Filed under: The Me's I Could Have Been | Tags: life, lottery, millionaire, money, wish list
Yep. Somebody with my name won the Powerball sweepstakes in Pennsylvania a few years ago. So it started me thinking–what if I won the lottery? What would I do with the money?
Of course, the rational part of my brain says I should save a great heaping chunk of it, and make my decisions about what to do with it later–how to invest it, decide what portion to give to charity, etc. But just for fun, let’s go with the unrational part of my brain for a moment. Let’s pretend I won a windfall, and it was burning a hole in my pocket–and I decided it was my patriotic duty to spend it all to help stimulate this woeful economy. It would be the spending spree of a lifetime. (Or just another day for any of the Housewives of Orange County.)
Following is a random wish list:
*Pay off the mortgage!!!!
*Make my house “green”: solar panels, energy and water efficient appliances, etc.
*Help my family (on both sides of the pond)–with mortgages, my nieces’ and nephews’ college funds, trips for my parents and parents-in-law.
*Buy my husband a new car.
*Take a trip to New Zealand (and not just for the “Lord of the Rings” tour, as my husband and brothers would suggest.)
*Convert the attic of my condo into a master bedroom suite and build an astronomical observatory for my husband on the roof.
*Go tornado hunting.
*Take my husband to see the Grand Prix in Monte Carlo.
*Walk on the Great Wall of China.
*Buy property around the world. Here are a few I’ve been dreaming about:
-a house on the West Coast of Ireland
-a flat in London
-a villa in Tuscany or the South of France
-a large, rambling house by the sea where my family and I could hang out during the summers
*Witness a full solar eclipse.
*Swim in Jellyfish Lake in Palau:
*Hire a personal chef, like Oprah.
*Walk the pilgrimage route of the Camino de Santiago from France to Spain. Then, after I’ve meditated and repented for a month or so, do a round-the-country culinary tour of Spain, just like Mario Batali and Gwyneth Paltrow did.
*Buy a pair of orange crocs for said culinary tour, a la Mario.
*Get my teeth whitened.
*Eat in a Gordon Ramsay restaurant.
*Fly in a helicopter over the Grand Canyon.
*Visit the Dalai Lama.
*Get myself a stylist and makeover artist to put me together enough that I feel at home in New York City. (A challenge, indeed.)
*Go to Finland with my ENTIRE family so:
-my mom could find her ancestors
-we could all see the Northern Lights
-I could take my nieces and nephews to see Santa Claus in Lapland, all bundled up in a sleigh.
*Build a natural disaster shelter in my backyard, and stock it with lots and lots of canned goods, and an air/water filtering system, its own generator, and a gagillion dvds. (Because, you know, I just watched Armageddon Week on the History Channel.)
*Get a couple of Kindles for the disaster shelter and download a bunch of books, because clearly there wouldn’t be enough room for regular books. They would have to be all happy books, though. All happy ones. No Cormac MacCarthy’s The Road or anything like that.
*Do a kitschy cross-country tour of the U.S. in a big RV, visiting things like the largest ball of twine, the Mothman Museum, etc.
*Take a picture of myself hitchhiking on the road to nowhere that Sarah Palin built to get to the Bridge to Nowhere (that never got built because she said “thanks, but no thanks.” But I guess she just said “thanks” for the road. Go figure.)
*Start a “School of Small-Town Values” in Wasilla, Alaska, where people could take classes on things like unwed teenage motherhood, blessings to protect against witchcraft, game hunting from helicopters, winking, nepotism, watching Russia (using binoculars! extra points for seeing Putin rearing his head!), meth labs 101, reading every magazine and newspaper (warning: not a gut course), folksy talk, and looking like a hot librarian.
*buy a load of lottery tickets. Because clearly one sweepstakes win wouldn’t be enough to fund all of this.
