My sidequests for this week were pretty simple ones. I was to take a virtual tour of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, learn out to say hello in a different language, and take 5 minutes to visualize a positive future for myself.

I had to Google the Smithsonian one, as that wasn’t something I was aware existed. Apparently there are several available to choose from. I browsed the exhibit about the Wright brothers. It’s interesting, and the image quality is high enough that you can read most of the text through the exhibit with the exceptions of really small text set further away from the designated “standing spots” or the occasional area where there is glare from lighting. It’s a fun idea that gives a broad strokes feel for the exhibits on display, but a poor substitute for actually going. For one, I like to get close and look at things, and read everything. There are also screens that looked like they had video displays for the exhibits, and seeing a picture of something from a few different angles is not quite the same as looking at it in person.

Also, I’m the sort of nerd that loves going to museums. If you really like those particular subjects and lack the funds to go, it’s a suitable substitute, though, and worth checking out.

For learning to say hello in another language, I used Google again. (Google has all the answers, right?) They’ve got their list of languages you can translate, and I kind of browsed some of the options to look at them. I found that there were some that I already knew but had never really thought about. Most interesting to me was Italian. Apparently, similar to Hawaiian “aloha,” “ciao” can mean both hello and goodbye. I had only ever understood it to be a goodbye, so that caught me a little by surprise.

While I technically already knew the word, I did manage to recontextualize it properly, and understand it more in line with its actual meaning.

The last one is the hardest for me. Not because I have a hard time being positive, but more because I have a hard time being specific. Most of my life I’ve had a very lax attitude about my personal direction. I’ve always felt: if it happens, it happens. Great! If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. Also great! I don’t mind the idea of falling in love – but if I don’t find a lover, I’m not going to rush and settle just to have ticked marriage off the box. Similar with having kids – I don’t mind the idea of having kids, but I’m not going to get into a tizzy and go get knocked up because I feel I have to.

They’re nice futures to have, but not necessary ones. And those are just the two major examples that people are likely to wonder on most, but I have a similar attitude towards most things in life. So trying to specify what I want in a “positive future” is hard to pin down, because as long as I’m enjoying myself I don’t care.

Things that would be nice and positive: a windfall of money, which would help anyone. How many people would ever turn down an extra cash windfall? Although this also ties into the recent writing prompt that wordpress posted for Bloganuary!

A fun daydream that everyone has. What would you do if you won the lottery? I would likely be too nervous to initially spend it. I would sit on it until I understood how it affected things tax wise. It also depends on how much you won. If the take home was roughly $1 million dollars, I could live on that quite comfortably for 20 years, but any big expenses will cut into that semi-retired life quite dramatically. Buy a new car? Have a new house built or pay off my current home and make improvements to it? Or any number of big money splurges that cuts into that take home will result in less time that I can go without working.

Of course, if you got someone to help you manage your financials and invested properly, and refrained from blowing it all at once, you could live quite comfortably without having to work again.

So, without work, what would I do with my time? I’ve heard plenty of people gripe about their retirement when they felt useless, but I’ve never had that problem. I would love having more time to take classes on interesting things and visit places I haven’t been. I love working on art and writing projects. I love sleeping in, and reading and playing games, and watching movies and shows. I could go to the gym in the middle of the night when it’s dead quiet, and spend time learning new recipes without having to worry about how long cooking and clean up will take, because I have to wake at a specific time to be at a specific place for a specific set of hours in a day.

As for more attainable positive things – I would like to try to vegetate less and work on my projects more within the next year. And lose weight. And finish my story I started last year and begin the editing process so I can maybe slap it on self publishing on Amazon near the end of the year and accomplish a life long goal of mine to publish some bullshit. Those are also all positive things.

….I took several more minutes than 5 to visualize all that. But it works!