WHAT I WANT

I want to find out who really assassinated J.F.K. (I think Oswald had a hand in it, but I think elements of the Mafia and the Cubans under Castro played a part.)

I want to publish a novel.

I want to run the Nagano Marathon, because I trained for it three years ago while I was living in Japan, only to blow out my knee a week before the race, and I vowed I'd go back and redeem myself.

I want to change the world. (A little bit.)

I want to visit North Korea, because Canadians can actually go there.

I want to read all of Shakespeare. (Just not tonight.)

I want to be happy. Forever.

I want to travel across Canada by train.

I want to go to Tianeman Square in China.

I want to visit the JFK Assassination Museum in Dallas Texas, housed on the sixth floor of the former Texas School Book Depository Building, where Oswald
was said to have fired his fatal shots.

I want visit the hotel room where Martin Luther King was shot.

I want to visit the Audobon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was shot, because they've just turned it into a museum or archive of his life, I think.

I want to visit all of the above places to connect with moments of history that involve great men.

I want to pass at least Level 3 of the Japanese Proficiency test, which I failed a couple of years ago. (But I was proud of my score, 'cause any score on a Japanese proficiency test, even a score of 1, is pretty good for a kid from St.Catharines, Ontario, I think.)

I want to be more humble.

I want to become the change I want to see in the world.

I want to visit India.

I want to meet Nelson Mandela, Vladamir Putin, and Bill Murray. (Doesn't have to be in that order.)

I want to know if ghosts are real and if UFOs are real. (I kind of suspect they're not, but I'm hoping I'm wrong.)

I want to become reasonably fluent in Japanese.

I want to become reasonably fluent in English.

I want to know where we go when we die (if anywhere).

I want to help people who need help.

I want to meet Stephen King and ask him why, in his novel IT, he has most of the characters remember Stanley Uris saying "The turtle couldn't help us", but nowhere in the flashback sections of the book are these words actually spoken (unless I missed them).

I want to be a leader, not a follower. (Unless I'm in North Korea, because there's only one Dear Leader allowed, and I think he'd be a little pissed.)

I want to know if cracking my knuckles will really give me arthritis in old age, but I'm scared to find out.

I want to go on a tour of the White House.

I want to understand Canadian and Japanese political systems.

I want to see the Cambodian people live in a (relatively) corruption-free society.

I want to see if I have what it takes to have what it takes.

I want to know if having seen almost every episode of Who's The Boss and Different Strokes and The Facts of Life and WKRP In Cincinatti will have any long-term emotional and spiritual consequences, in this life or the next.

I want to know my entire future, just for a moment, and then forget it all.

I want to see if the new Superman movie coming out next year will enhance or diminish my love of the Christopher Reeve movies.

I want to read Roots.

I want to go to England and discover my own roots.

I want to see how they're going to do the stretching effects on Mr.Fantastic and the fire effects on The Human Torch in the new Fantastic Four movie coming out later this year.

I want to read One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I've started a couple of times, but never finished.

I want to read Yukio Mishima in the original Japanese, because I've heard he's amazing (but that ain't going to happen).

I want reincarnation to be true, because it seems the coolest of all the after-life options.

I want to fully embrace (or at least a little bit) the Buddhist notion of non-attachment that Anakin Skywalker had so many problems with in Attack of the Clones, where we recognize that the glass we're drinking from is already broken, where we realize that that which we are drawing close to us is already pulling itself away, that nothing is permanent, including impermanence.

I want to not want so much.

What do you want?

THE HAPPY DAYS SYNDROME, or WHY WON'T YOU JUST GROW UP?

I have a theory that the reason why so many people in my age bracket (thirty and under) have a difficult time adjusting to adulthood is because the people we grew up with on TV and in the movies were actually significant older than the characters they were portraying.

It's the Happy Days Syndrome. You've got Richie Cunningham and Ralph Malph and Potsie, and they're all supposed to be in, like, Grade 10 and 11, and they're played by people in their early to mid-twenties. So by the time that I get to be fifteen and sixteen years old, I look in the mirror, and I see this young little twerp, not looking anything like Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller's Day Off (who was twenty-four playing seventeen), or Judd Nelson and Emilio Estevez in The Breakfast Club (also somewhere in the mid-twenties range) and so this weird, out-of-body dislocation takes place. My age doesn't match my image of what that age should be, so I instantly regress.

(The exception to this was the Canadian TV drama Degrassi Junior High, which used real ugly and average looking teenagers, not Beverly Hills 90210 supermodels. And I have my own Degrassi story, if you want to hear it, which is that when I was getting hired to go teach English in Japan, there was a training session in Toronto, and one of the people they brought in to motivate us was a former teacher who was back in Canada after finishing her contract, and she was a girl of about my age, twenty-three or so, short, pleasant, Canadian, and I couldn't figure out where I had seen her before, until I suddenly realized that this was Spike, the girl on Degrassi who got pregnant, the girl with really spiked-out, whacked-out hair, hence the name 'Spike', and I thought oh, so this is where former Canadian TV stars end up, and all of the other new teachers on the break realized simultaneously that we had a Degrassi alumnus in our midst, and that was a fun moment, a real moment, and I think she is back on TV on Degrassi: The Next Generation, which I've never seen because I've been away, and I'm not sure I want to see it, truth be told, because it's somewhat cool but somewhat sad, too, to see the same students who were on the show ten, fifteen years ago returning to play older, wiser versions of themselves. Sometimes the past should stay the past, I think, but I know that bills have to be paid, too.)

Spielberg once said when promoting Saving Private Ryan that if you go back and look at what seventeen, eighteen, nineteen year olds looked like back in the twenties and thirties and forties, you'll see that they simply look older than those in the same age brackets today. I think that's true. Take a look at pictures of your grandparents when they were in their twenties. They look, I don't know, adult. Mature. Advanced. Whereas we have shows like Friends that seem to glorify extended adolescence into a near-religion.

We all advance at different speeds from each other, anyways, but I think the media, its reflections and distortions of who we are at various points in our lives, have more sway than we're usually willing to admit in determining how and why we grow the way we do.

That's my excuse, anyway.