My trip to Chicago was more than relaxing and enjoyable, it was highly inspiring.  Jeff is becoming a monster at motivating himself and it made me very happy to see him learn to push and analyze himself.  But anyways, I made up some new life dreams and I'd like to share them now:

-judo fight former Russian president/now Russian dictator Vladimir Putin

Putin is famous for a lot of things - killing or jailing political rivals, being a hatchet man for the KGB, taking Russia back into its unfinished fight with America, etc.  But you may not know that he is a highly enthusiastic and passionate practitioner of judo.  He never quite got to being a national level competitor (turns out you can't win judo by secretly killing your opponents), but he has really pushed Russian judo clubs and he continues to regularly practice the sport.  Conveniently, the people in his judo club who have beaten him have all gone on to become oil billionaires and members of his cadre. 

I want to pull a Rocky IV and judo fight Putin.  I'd like him to tell the media in a pre-fight interview "If he dies.....he dies" and tell me as we bow to each other "I must break you".  Ideally, he would also scream in Russian "he's like a rusty old piece of iron!" while we were fighting, which would be subtitled so I understand what he said.  I would also defeat him in dramatic fashion.

-ride in the boxcar of a train with a hobo

Jeff told me that Chicago has gotten good at throwing hobos in the trash and keeping them there.  Except in the underground portion of the Wacker, where hobos have formed a small colony and they'll rob, rape, and kill anybody who enters their territory.  It's exactly portrayed in Batman Begins, that part was more documentary than fiction. 

But the train that Jeff uses to commute to his job has some boxcars and I would like to sneak into one, only to find a hobo and his bindle (the stick with the bag on it).  Hopefully I could convince him not to rape me, but I wouldn't mind fighting the hobo and throwing him out of the moving train either.  If I fought him, I would throw him out just as he was pushing my face towards a wheel and laughing maniacally.  This would also require me to say something unnecessarily bad-ass in a deep and gravelly voice.  Like the hobo would yell "You're going down!" as he was pushing my face out of the train door, and I would reply in a super deep voice "No, I don't do that" then throw him out with a sacrifice throw. 

-live in Tokyo and enjoy the finest food in the world

I'm working through material for a post on the best food cultures in the world, but this year food connoisseurs have been shocked to discover that Tokyo is the food capital of the world.  Tokyo offers 147,000 restaurants, including 6,000 in the financial district.  This leads to extreme competition and the very finest result of such pure capitalism, which is that eating establishments serving anything less than exquisite food are promptly wiped out.  But in terms of stars, Tokyo's restaurants received more stars than Paris and New York combined, and Tokyo features French and Italian food that rivals anything you find in France or Italy so the Japanese aren't just a one-trick pony.  Restaurant magazines show Japan's love for connoisseurship, as they are second in sales and readership (sex is first, fashion is third). 

What all this means is that you could live in Tokyo indefinitely and find a new revelation about an undiscovered restaurant almost every day.  I'd like to live there for a while, maybe a year or two, and sample the foods. 

And you know, just to show their concern and love for food, Japan's other great innovation is in toilet technology.  Everyone knows about the electronic bidet, but few people know the lengths to which Japan has gone high-tech.  At this point, toilets in Japan are just pots of water without electricity.  Some can't be flushed manually any more.  Japan's latest toilet features no less than 39 buttons.  Every detail is covered, from seat warmers to the air flow in the bathroom to a control for a stream of water to cover the sound of pooing (a favorite among women, the maker says).  You can wash, mist, and dry just about every part of your groin area.  So Japanese restaurants are so nice that they not only cover every detail on the way in, they also cover details on the way out.  Pretty sweet.