List and Ghosts

Things I'd like to have happen by forty:
--marriage
--possibly children; if not by forty, then I probably won't ever have children
--a stable income that could support my wife and I; it wouldn't matter to me if my wife worked or made more money than me, as long as she doesn't choose her career over our marriage
--a house
--sense of individual accomplishment through my work
--a consistent way of helping other people
--plenty of time spent abroad
--this is not a comprehensive list

I don't know what else to blog about. I'm typing as I think.

Do you believe in ghosts? I don't, but I know a lot of people who do. Their reasons are mainly personal stories of unexplainable things happening around them. For instance, a have a friend who believes there is a ghost-woman in a white dress who walks his street every night at 2 am. Not a homeless person; a transparent, ethereal apparition that appears and disappears every night at the same time. I have another friend who thought his house was haunted because he's heard strange sounds like footsteps or doors closing. They know I don't believe, so sometimes when they're done telling me one of these stories, they look at me and go, Well, how do you explain that? And my answer nearly every time is, I can't. I can't disprove that a ghost slammed a door in your house or walks around in the middle of the night; I CAN, however, say it's very unlikely the kind of thing you think of as ghosts--namely, a human being in spirit form who can somehow physically manipulate objects--are responsible for these incidents. If you were raised in a culture that believed 3-inch-tall invisible elves did all these unaccountable things, then you'd blame them for scaring you at night. I suppose that still doesn't explain why strange things occur, but, culturally, it's just as reasonable. Maybe there are other-worldly forces that cause these things, but calling these forces ghosts is over-simplifying the problem, and leads to more fear rather than more understanding.