In no particular order:

1.  Don't Stop Believin' - Journey
2.  Stop This Train - John Mayer
3.  Wonderwall - Oasis
4.  Moonlight Sonata - Beethoven  
​5.  Our House - Crosby Stills and Nash

...also, this is the most impossible list ever to compile.  I also love: 

We are the Champions - Queen 
Black or White - Michael Jackson (karaoke!)
Basically any song from Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits
Scenes from an Italian Restaurant - Billy Joel

This list is grossly incomplete.  Boo. 

As a person with a lot of opportunity in life, the idea of a dream job was never very far away from the actual motives behind my actions as a kid;  basically anything was possible to (at least) try.  

So, I'll admit that my dream job now - the job I think I'd really like to do day in and day out - is something more or less akin to this:  writing and shooting a blog.  It's a fun creative outlet and provides for a flexible schedule.  I do enjoy it.  

But if we're going to get into stretch goals of the kind that little girl's fantasies are made of, then I have to go all the way and admit my BIG dream job (or at least my used-to-be BIG dream job).  Occupation: movie star. 

What a surprise.  ha. 

It is a strange culture that we live in where film and television actors are adored so much.  I mean, all they do is pretend to be someone else.  They're not saving lives.  But indeed, there has always been a fascination among humans with other people and their lives, so I suppose it is an easy step for most people to find fascination in beautiful people who are made equally attainable and unattainable at the same time.  Maybe that's the real appeal of celebrity:  you can look, but you can't touch.  

So I suppose my childhood dreams of becoming an actress spoke to this somewhat ubiquitous fascination with the culture, and why not?  The film industry is just that: an industry that sells​.  It's goal is to build investment in its stars to increase their value and boy, it does a great job at that. 

But the flip side of that pancake is a real and tangible love of the art.  Even as a kid, the image of actor that I had of myself was the sort that haunted dark theaters and frequented acting classes.  I wanted to be a serious actor and I loved stage acting as much as the more commercial film variety.  I didn't want to be famous, I wanted to act and acting that got you big success is the movie kind. 

I'll be getting this post in just under the wire today.  I found this quote (it found me?) in a book of poetry by Rumi that was on the shelf at the library several years back.  It was exactly the kind of moment that is now so often lost; a completely random instant where a book you'd normally never search for, or be matched with through one of today's user-targeted advertising program, comes into your hands and connects you to something you never even knew you didn't know. 

Rumi was a Persian mystic poet of the thirteenth century.  His work focuses on love and the "beloved" -- symbols of God and Islamic mysticism.  He is most closely associated with the whirling dervish of Turkey, a practice that derives from Rumi's belief in music as away to connect to God. 

When I read these words, "Everything in the universe is in you.  Ask all from yourself."  It meant to me, that no matter what I came across, whether it be internal struggles or external barriers - that all of the universe was connected - that not only was I in the universe, but the universe was in me, too.  That I was bound to it and thus made boundless by it.  Anything that was a challenge to me, was a part of the universe and a part of the universal experience; therefore, I need only ask the universe within me for the strength to persevere and the wisdom to seek the answers I need.  By looking to ourselves, we can see that any answer is available to us - if only we realize that we are connected to the universe through each other, as each other.  We needn't find the answers to the universe externally or from another who is anointed with a universal wisdom, we need only to seek the answers to universe in and among ourselves to truly find peace in our lives.