Hopes, wishes

Natalie played along with a thoughtful list of seven habits/quirks/facts about herself and made me wonder, yet again, how she does it. How she comes up with these insightful, funny, meaningful things to say yet again? And then I saw that she had tagged me and I doubted I had it in me. Haven't I dredged the bottom of my quirkiness lake to the point where there's no muck left? And then I checked on her this morning and saw that her abuelo, her grandfather, had passed away and I thought, well, can't I find a way to make her laugh a little? To both honor her tagging of me but to find another way to approach it?

And I don't know -- I don't know if this will turn out to be funny, or not. But I thought I would make mine a list of seven hopes and wishes that I have. I thought maybe I will reveal some of my own quirkiness that I myself don't see very clearly but that will be obvious to others from my list.
Here goes:

1. When I was driving home yesterday, I wished that I would pass a driveway with a backyard soccer goal net down at the end of it with a "Free!" sign on it. Do people do this where you live -- put things at the end of their driveway with "Free!" signs on them? They do it around here, but I've never seen anything that made me stop. So I figure that if I start focusing on a specific wish, maybe it will happen. I'm not sure how I would wrangle it home in my car, but maybe THAT would be the funny part.

2. I wish I could arrange for Dean to have lunch and then maybe a training session with Fernando Torres. I figure it's kind of the least I could do, given that I can't make Dean's wish come true -- that Fernando Torres were his older brother. Dean's having trouble wrapping his head around my having told him that aside from our not living in Spain and my having never met Mr. Torres senior, I could be Fernando's mom (in that I am old enough to have a 24-year-old son). I have yet to turn up a photo of Mr. Torres senior, though, so I can't be completely sure that it would have been a possibility. Ahem.

3. When I see a movie like Speed Racer, I wish I could have been a racer car driver -- you know, like Danica Patrick or something (although please -- don't get me wrong -- I'm not interested in her whole glam/super model thing, just in the race car driving). When we watched all the Euro Cup matches, I wished I could have been a soccer star in my youth. It's not about being unhappy with my own life, but more about having some remarkable past under my belt that, say, my brothers could brag to their friends about or whatever.

At my old job, a couple of the guys on my staff were real football fanatics, and I don't remember exactly how it started but I made a joke that I had dated Jim McMahon back when I lived in Chicago. I want to say that one of the guys made some totally implausible statement, and I responded by saying, "yeah, and I dated Jim McMahon." So anyway, it turned into this thing -- that at least one of the guys thought I was telling the truth and then it got around in certain circles; for guys, knowing someone who knew a Super Bowl winning quarterback is pretty huge. I kept trying to dispel the myth whenever it came up -- "guys, seriously, I was kidding" -- but I think that for at least one of them, being able to go around saying, "yeah, my boss used to date Jim McMahon" made the everyday life just a little more interesting.

4. I wish I could sing. Really sing. Even that I could sing The Star Spangled Banner in front of the crowd at a baseball game. I do sing The Star Spangled Banner when we go to baseball games (at the appropriate time, thank you) but Dean begs me to stop.

5. I hope that I have cleaned up my last house-training accident. Given that the dog is only 7 months old, this could be unlikely. But still, I hope.
6. I hope that I'm on the "cool mom" list amongst Dean and his friends. I think they are actually another year or so away from those conversations -- you know, when you try to figure out whose house you want to go to based on the mom's coolness factor. It's not about being lenient nor oblivious; cool moms can be totally tough and impose major limits and rules. But it's about being the mom, or one of the moms, who can be trusted and counted on and who doesn't dress in such a way that causes embarrassment to the crew (this is probably where I'm going to fail the test, though).

7. I wish that I could stop time, be invisible, read minds, and run five miles. All seem as equally attainable to me.

Tomorrow I will tag seven bloggers, and I'll put it out there as a hope/wish list. Hope that's legal.