Part 6 of my 40 before 40 list, begun here.

26. Pass a 16-footer in Dance Dance Revolution

This is another fitness-related goal. Songs in DDR are rated from 1-20 on their difficulty. Well, 1-19 because there is currently no difficulty 20 song. In DDR’s heyday in the 2000s this was just a 1-10 difficulty scale, and somewhere along the way it got tweaked. It’s not that an 11 now is harder than a 10 back then, a ten back then would be maybe a 15 now?

Anyway, I can currently achieve many of the 13s and a scant few of the 14s if I’m lucky.

There have been no home DDR releases for a while now, but arcade releases are still going strong. Both Dave and Busters and Round1 arcade locations in the US (but not all of them) have DDR A20, the latest arcade release. At home, I use StepMania to practice several times a week.

One thing making this different is that I use no bar. Usually, people at this skill level would make use of the back bar (in all arcades, and a few of the more die-hard home setups) to balance themselves. But while researching this goal, I did find out that there are reports of no-bar players achieving perfect plays on 18 songs, so I’ll go on ahead with this.

Anyway, for an idea of what I’m getting myself into…

27. Read and finish a book every two months. Should be a new (not already read) topic I can see myself benefiting from.

I need to read more books. But this is also about varying the types of books that I read. At first, I limited this to nonfiction books, but a good fiction book could be in the queue too. I also initially had every three months, but I think two is also possible.

28. Do a no-food fast for at least two days.

I have done five day religious fasts before, but only while I was eating a hearty dinner each day. It’s more a matter of fear that has stopped me from going into the realm of true hunger, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be possible. My wife has done it. Many others have done it. Both for much longer than two days. Liquid would be allowed, of course.

29. Monthly date with my wife

Since me and my wife have gotten married, we’ve done a lot of things together that might constitute dates, but rarely have we actually used the word ‘date’. As time goes on, though, it’ll become more important to be more intentional with these, and thus this goal.

30. Host a party

This one means using our house to host a get-together of multiple households for no particular reason other than a party. Pretty simple.

31-35 coming soon!

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