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When I came back, many of my friends in New York all of a sudden had these “Bucket Lists.” They were spurred by the Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson film that features two men dying of cancer who create a list of items they want to do before they kick the bucket.

Earlier this week, I took advantage of my fabulous NYPL card and finally borrowed the film (free rentals? recession be damned!). In the movie the characters spend a couple of months traveling around the world. It was pretty surreal watching it and seeing some very familiar places and realizing that the trip I just finished is actually a collection of “trips of a lifetime” for many. It made me think back to my 50 Life Goals list that I’ve had ever since I was 15. Granted, the list has had many incarnations in the past 12 years and has never even had 50 goals at any given time…but still…

I mean, I’ve always liked having things to work toward. I love looking at it a couple of times every year and marking things off. I love looking at it and thinking…”what the hell was I thinking?” And I love the fact that I can buy an indulgence during a so-called economic downturn and not feel guilty because I know I’ve wanted that for years.

But while watching the movie, I have to say, I think my “bucket list” is far different from my already created life goals list. I mean, the goals I have are all very forward-thinking. They’re things I want to accomplish, or things I want to have, or people I want to know because I think they’ll make me happier in the long run. A bucket list, on the other hand, seems to have things that are just experiences to have because they’re great experiences.

But what was even crazier was realizing that I’ve got plenty of travel goals on my list o’ life goals (which includes visiting Europe, making a trip to the Final Four, and visiting all 50 states, among others). But if I were to know when my life were to end or to create a bucket list, I don’t think travel would be anywhere on there. Travel, like my goal of learning to play the guitar, or my dream of owning a house with a gazebo, would seem pretty fruitless if life were ending in six months.

I guess I’m just saying it made me realize that I don’t really travel because I like traveling. I do it because I like the person that I think it makes me.*

(*not that I think learning to play the guitar or owning a house with a gazebo would make a better person, though…)

Friday night my friends and I were celebrating a birthday and got to witness one of the UN’s best ideas of the year. Some of its employees were out having a “Mustache Karaoke” night.

Seriously…good times.

There are many ways me and my parents’ generation differ. One that became oh so clear yesterday was how we find out about the end of someone’s life.

For my parents, they usually find out through phone conversations or the bump-in at the grocery store. After the normal chit-chat, there usually comes a pause and something along the lines of, “Oh…did you hear about Billy’s boy?” Then, both parties would exchange thoughts on Billy’s son and why the death was so unbelievable (or expected, if that’s the case). On the rare occasions that there was no conversation about said death, my parents usually found out when they saw someone “up on the board” at the local funeral home. Then, they’d usually be calling someone to tell them about the name they just saw at White’s.

But then there’s my generation. Last year my roommate randomly decided to check up on a high school best friend via her myspace page, only to find she’d been killed days before in a car accident. Her friends had plastered comments immediately, grieving about how much they missed her, and that was how M. found out about her friend’s death.

And yesterday I opened up an e-mail to my j-school listserve announcing the death of a former resident of mine. Although I’d only spoken with him once or twice since my graduation, I couldn’t help but well up with tears as I read through his blog, chronicling his three-time diagnosis with cancer over the past four years. He was so young…so innocent (his freshman-year nickname was Sweetpea); I couldn’t believe such a genuinely sweet person had passed away in his mid-20s.

Thinking about how short life is and how much it rarely makes sense, the most frustrating part of it was that I had nobody to share that with. My parents could at least discuss it with the messenger. But with our generation…except for the most close of friends or family…that news comes not from a face-to-face conversation or phone call. But we learn our news from a computer.

And although it’s speedier and we learn things about far-off friends, well, sometimes you just want to see a face that scrunches up when delivering the news. Or to hear a sigh that says, “I know. Wow, huh?”