My ten life goals

I am achingly close to accomplishing one of my life goals! I am marrying the love of my life in just under a month now. I may have had some false starts, but Katie was certainly worth the wait! I love being with her and being a part of her. I'm so happy to be spending the rest of my life with her, and I'm very excited to be celebrating our marriage in front of 200 of our friends and family in just four weeks!

More on that later. This post is about my life goals. I started my list fifteen years ago after reading a magazine article on an airplane. The article suggested that keeping an up-to-date list of goals was a good way to keep some perspective on life. It seemed like a neat idea to me, so I started right away. Although I could have populated my list with things like "finish college" or "land safely," I wanted my goals to be longer term and involve significant effort toward something that I might not normally take. I started with three goals and added more as the years went by. I just added the tenth goal now, figuring that it's only fair to add another one since I'm crossing one off.

Here, then, are my life goals:

Goal	Start	Odds	Notes
Get my doctorate	1992	100%	Completed: December 2000
Marry for love	1992	99.9998%	Coming to a Pavilion near me, June 2007! (I figure the odds of a tragic fatal accident in any given month are 0.0001%)
Start a family	1992	97%	Completed: June 2007 + nine months?
Travel to all 50 United States	1994	99%	I'm 90% done with this one. I still need to get to Alaska, Oregon, Idaho, South Carolina, and Mississippi.
Have a first-author paper accepted to Cell, Science, or Nature	1994	50%	I am first author on papers in three lesser journals. I am co-author on one Cell paper, and I am also marrying someone who is co-author on a Science paper.
Experience weightlessness in space	1995	60%	This is currently just out of my price range at $20,000,000 for a trip on Soyuz. Virgin Galactic is planning on starting regular flights in 2009, however, and is selling advance tickets for $200,000. Market projections estimate the price will drop to $25,000 in the foreseeable future as the market grows to 1,000,000 passengers per year.
View a total solar eclipse	1995	98%	I toyed with traveling to Turkey on March 29, 2006. July 22, 2009 in Shanghai, July 11, 2010 in Tahiti, or November 13, 2012 in Australia and New Zealand are tempting. August 1, 2008 in Siberia or March 20, 2015 on the North Pole are less tempting. The continental US will have one on August 21, 2017 (the first since 1979).
See an effective treatment for Huntington’s disease developed	1997	95%	I made this goal the year I was diagnosed and dedicated my professional life to finding a treatment. I know I have only a small part to play in this with the research I do, but I’ll keep working at this as long as I can.
Win an open event at a North American Bridge Championship	1999	1%	I thought much more highly about my bridge prospects when I set this goal. To increase my chances, I need to have a long-term established partnership that is very highly practiced. I’m working on this, but other of my life goals have taken more of my time of late. I want to get as close to this goal as I can. In July of 2004, I won an open regional event, one step below the North American title. The closest I’ve come to winning a North American Bridge Championship is qualifying for the second day of play in the IMP Pairs, also in July of 2004. (That was a good tournament. Both of those were with my grad school partner Dave.)
Travel to 25 foreign countries	2005	50%	I made this after enjoying myself so much with Katie on our trip to France and England. Before the trip, international travel never really appealed to me so much. That changed with the idyllic walks around Paris. So far I’m only 28% of the way to my goal: I have been to Canada, Iceland, Netherlands, England, France, Italy, and (when I was a year old) the Bahamas.
Write a book	2007	99%	Now I’m up to an even ten goals. I was inspired to add this based on Alyse’s writing her recent novel (will blog about this later) and also Rusty's repeated exhortations that I should write a book. My book will probably be a list of amusing reminiscences along the lines of Richard Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman. I have few hopes of getting mine published like his unless I also happen to win a Nobel Prize.