Now for the other 49.  Some of these look truly impossible at this point and one or two give me the shivers.  Which sadist suck them on the list?  Who?  Me?  Are you certain, because they don’t look like things I would write on my _own_ list of things to do.  Oh.  Bugger – so I’ve only myself to blame.

Note to self: be a bit vaguer on the next 1001 list and remember that you’ll change your views about stuff during the 1001 days so don’t stick a bunch of stupid tasks on there just because you saw them on the internet.

I think I will try to take a few of the easy ones that I’ve put off and also try to make a inroads into the one’s where it’s going to take months to complete.  Like Number 1.  Write a Novel.  Feck! I’m an idiot.  At least it didn’t say a good novel.  So it might be worse.  And it’s 1.  The first thing that I wrote on the list.  So I sat down a couple of years ago and said to myself – yeah, lets have at that 1001 thing.  Then for the first thing I wanted to do, I wrote down: Write a novel.   Why on Gods green earth did I choose that at all, let alone as the first thing I wanted to do.  Barmey.  Fine.  How hard can it be to write a short novel that doesn’t have to be good.  How many words do you need for a short story to become a novel?  I dunno.  More words than I’ve written in total since I started on the list I expect.  Argh. Well, at least it makes doing 50 push-ups in a row look easy, so that’s something.  Maybe I can ask the nun I’m supposed to talk to about it.  Did I really write this list.  Yes, yes I did.  Oh dear.

I deliberately made this list hard for myself, because I thought that was the whole point.  I stuck tasks on there that I knew I would be very lucky to do.  I also didn’t take into account the changing world or the changing me.  So  I’m stuck with a few things that I don’t really fancy much now.  At least not so much as I once did.

I think I will complete between 85 and 90 of the 101 tasks in under 1001 days, which (if I am honest with myself) is about what I thought that I would do.  I will have tried to complete them all, at least giving them some serious consideration and hopefully got stuck into them mostly.  For me that’s the purpose of the list – not 101 things done but 101 things tried.

I don’t exist to tick stuff off but to do things.  Things that I enjoy – not in the hedonistic kind of way but more of an Ayn Rand way – albeit tempered with a degree of dogmatic Calvinist fatalism. Anyway I knew that the list isn’t the journey but the destination and that travelling a direct line through it to 101 ticks isn’t what life’s about for me.  But, now that it existed I owe it to myself to enjoy the completion of tasks and that I must work hard to finish them well.  Ticks will become the currency of happiness and the markers of a job well done.  I would become a slave to it.  Then I would rebel and not do them because they were there on this list.

Anywho.  I am now constantly torn.  Do them or not do them?  Delete the list or tick another thing off?  I want to do these things, but I want to do them because I want to, not because they are on some stupid list.  But I also know that I want to get 101 ticks and hold my head up high as a self motivated, task completing, job done kinda guy.  A starter finisher.  So the list surives another day.  I’ll go comment on something instead of mooching here (number 88) and that will make me worry less (number 18) and be happier (number 101).  Cool.

I cheated a bit, I nicked a few things from her list and I also included a few things that I have actually done before but wanted to do again (but for some reason I never get around too).  Mostly though my list is new and (for me anyway) difficult.  I will struggle to complete these things in the next 1001 days, but that’s the point.  Well for me anyway it is.  I could have written an easy list or a list of things I’d already done and crossed most of them off to impress, er well not myself anyway.

It seems like the 101 in 1001 thing is some craze that, up until now, I’d missed.  There are a whole bunch of sites devoted to it even.  So I’m a bit late, but I’ve done my List 101 page now and it’s up on this site, in all its glory.  Hopefully I will do most of these things, and I’m going to go start on one of them now.

1. Dog Food.  Dogs not not like raw onion and would rather stave.  They will eat them boiled and fried but in this case there is an after-effect that isn’t worth the saving over regular dog chow from the shops.
2. Cheap earrings for your chav ex-girlfriends birthday present.  She won’t see the funny side and she will pour brake fluid over the boot of your car.
3. Person Repellents.  Some say hanging onions on your front door will repel people you don’t want to see.  This is a myth that probably sprung up with the vampire and garlic thing.  No one, it seems, is frightened off by a string of onions on the door.  Certainly not Jehovah’s Witnesses, postmen, the tax collector or my neighbours.  They do cause people to ask the same fecking question though.
4. Batteries.  Everyone knows that MacGyver can use two onions, a tea spoon and the foil from an kit-kat to power anything from a cell phone to a thermonuclear device.  But let me tell you:  Onions are fecking useless as batteries in everyday situations.  Unless you are professor of Chemistry (at a red brick university) never come to the rescue of an attractive colleague who says her cellphone battery as died, saying “Don’t worry I’ve got half a pound of onions, we’ll soon have you fixed up”.  You’ll look as much like a burk as it’s possible to look.
5. Currency.  Unless you live in the jungle and your neighbours are happy about a barter economy then you’re going to be disappointed by the purchasing power of onions.  (if you do live in the jungle and trade onions with the pygmies then may I ask how you keep mould out of your laptop screen?  This was such a problem I moved back to the city, but I digress).  In the western world a pound of onions is worth at most 50 pence.  Thus paying for things in onions is a true pain in the arse so people just won’t take the damn things.  Here are some  examples of the number of average sized onions required to purchase stuff.  As you can see it soon gets ridiculous:-

• A pint of beer – 19 onions.
• A hamster – 58 onions.
• A video game – 206 onions.
• Decent earrings for your chav ex-girlfriends birthday – 456 onions.