A List-less Life

I don't know when the list-making started. Maybe it was my first trip journal, recording every souvenir bought on our traipses through London and Cornwall. Maybe it was when my mother would read us to sleep with Emma and processions of ladies and gentlemen waltzed through my dreams. Or I could have been hooked by the orderly rows of numbers progressing across my arithmetic homework. I don't know when it started, but that doesn't matter. I want to know where it will finish.

Without lists, I would spend my days under Damocles' sword, constantly wondering what latest task I've failed to complete or which friend I have snubbed by forgetting a phone call. I would live in a messy house with smelly dogs. I would never change my oil, return library books, or register to vote. I would get up in the morning and wonder what my day held.

With my lists, I certainly can't tell the future. What I can do is make an educated guess about what comes next: off to school, print a paper, deliver a card, teach a class, work in the library, stop at the store for eggs and milk on the way home. Any one of these items could be lost, abandoned to the place where uncompleted tasks go. But my list keeps them safe, like a rope guiding pre-schoolers to the bus stop. My list ropes my tasks in, and sends them off only when they're ready to go. I even have a ritual, a game of sorts, to celebrate the completion of tasks on my to-do list. I draw little boxes for the pure pleasure of x-ing them out. The ink always runs deeper in the x than in the box's borders, as though it were made heavier by the deep satisfaction is expresses. When I complete a list, I christen it with a bright blue x, highlighter or marker, depending on what's handy.

Not all lists receive this treatment, however. I've listed books to read, music to hear, cities to visit, life goals, short-term needs, reasons for reading comic books, ideas for Christmas gifts, important family dates in September, and items to include in my commitment ceremony vows. Occasionally a few items make the move to my to-do list and receive their x in turn. On their original lists, these items still stand, however. They bear silent witness to who I've been and what I've concerned myself with. Each year, these lists swell, mirroring my own mental and social growth. Fantasy novels give way to literary fiction, Ben Folds to Sigur Ros, Rome to Grafton, WV, home of my in-laws. The I-Want-To-Be list moves from pilot to astronaut to poet to English teacher. Comic books and Christmas gifts intermingle as the friends who introduced me to comics make it onto my Christmas list. My ceremony vow list I have never shared with anyone, nor do I intend to. The final vows speak for themselves.

These are useful lists that map me as certainly as any psychological profile. But memory is a tricky thing, and I too often forget how to read the maps I myself created. At seven years old, why was I so intent on collecting all the Little House on the Prairie books? I don't remember anything about them, other than the name Laura and a single wispy image of hot bricks warming frozen feet on a long sled ride. At thirteen, who was Mary, and why did I consider inviting her to my birthday party? Perhaps these lacunae are for the best, however. They remind me that not all things worth listing are worth remembering. For I commonly forget this fact, and would no sooner leave my house without my to-do list than without my glasses. Each enables me to make sense of the world.

I recently took a Miggs-Bryers personality test and discovered that my type is characterized by a deeply analytical approach to life. No wonder I so love lists; they break the world into manageable parts. But I worry about the tendency to overlay complexity with a disarmingly orderly appearance. Life isn't orderly, no matter how badly I wish for it to be. I've gotten myself into trouble by forgetting this fact. I once lost several hundred dollars from the change bank at my Starbucks job, because I could only think to run through my checklist of cash handling procedures. The moment I realized the money was missing, I grabbed my morning's to-do list and checked every place I had been, remembering where the money was while I was stocking pastries, grinding coffee, driving to the bank, setting the safe to open. The money was nowhere, and I panicked for three hours, repeatedly searching my car, missing a Sociology test, and sweating huge crescents into the pits of my black polo. Only then, at another barista's suggestion, did I consider whether I had gone anywhere not on my to-do list. Sure enough, the two hundred dollars sat tucked by the toilet in a nondescript gray satchel, right where I had left it, overlooked by dozens of patrons who had used our facilities in the meantime.

I suppose that story doesn't really illustrate my getting myself into trouble. Thanks to a lot of luck and dash of incuriosity, my reputation and job were safe. The dangers constantly lurking in my mind showed themselves clearly that day, though. I stand in constant peril of ignoring the important if I haven't written it down. Not only the important, but the obvious, stands to be lost. I cannot bear to think that I am missing the subtle nuances of life and being human and aware and lost in the thicket of other people and their emotions simply because I've started to think in bullet points.

Perhaps it is to ward off this ill fate that I've begun my Ph.D. in English literature. Literature cannot be reduced to a checklist. Nor can rhetoric, or criticism, or theoretical schools. Literature forces my thoughts to web together, in intricate and unpredictable ways. Quintilian links to Vonnegut, who references old dead Englishmen, which group includes Pater, who led me to Longinus, who pops up in Quintilian. Intertextuality, both within and between texts, saves me from a life of checking things off my list just to check them off. I'll keep making lists, and I'll definitely love marking my x in the box. But when I use lists, I won't quantify the items. I'll get things done. And I'll let other things go, ignore a task or two, wander aimlessly with my dogs in the desert, pick books based only their covers, send cookies to friends if I feel like it, and--every so often--I'll leave the house without my to-do list.

Why I Am Not the Grammar Police

I spent the summer working at an administrative office at UNLV, doing all sorts of interesting and largely non-English things. I did write and design a handbook, but in some strange way that often felt more like programming than writing. Of the dozen or so people working on the same project as me, I was the only English student. My fellow graduate students were studying in the Department of Higher Education, Neurobiology, Psychology, and surely at least one other department which I've missed. I apologize, unnamed and forgotten department. While working in this office, I became a de facto editor, revising and copy editing almost all the writing associated with this one large-scale crazy project.

I suppose I should tell you about this project. Then I won't have to keep using vague nouns like "administrative office" and "project." Otherwise, this essay will devolve into meaningless, tenuously connected statements. ("Freedom is good. Support the troops.") They might be powerful and evocative in my head, but right now I'm concerned with your heads, not mine.

And, really, the need to substitute specific nouns for vague ones stabs right at the heart of the titular claim: that I will tell you why I am not the grammar police.

I worked for the Academic Success Center (ASC) at UNLV as a graduate assistant. My duties centered on a new academic coaching program which is currently being implemented for undergraduates. Along with two other folks, I designed and made happen the training program for 15 coaches who are now helping undergrads with study skills, time management, and all those other aptitudes of which we college teachers lament our students' lack.

Whew, what a sentence that was. "...of which we lament the lack..." Wowzers, that one popped my eyebrow up a scoch. I'm pretty sure it's grammatically correct. Anyone who knows better, feel free to comment; not being the grammar police does not mean I don't appreciate those who are.

While at the ASC, co-workers frequently looked to me when unsure about the propriety of their use of English in casual conversation. These looks tended to be wary, and mildly self-deprecating. There was often a bit of the dare in their own raised eyebrows. The expression read, "I think I'm wrong, catch me if you can, I know you want to." At first, as a people-pleaser, I fulfilled the implicit conversational expectation and jumped into the breach with a quick lecture on dangling whatchamadoozits or the etymology of "virulence." I did not jump happily, however, and that got me thinking.

Never was I unclear about my conversational partner's meaning. Never did the grammatical mini-lecture contribute to greater understanding of the topic at hand. I was no Santa, doling out the gift of grammatical expertise. I was a Krampus, delivering metaphorical knocks to misbehaved users of poor syntax. At points, these knocks derailed a conversation, destroying rather than enabling meaning and communication.

I care about grammar. I think it's important to understand proper usage. Proper usage is, however, not a goal in itself. Proper usage is the means to the end, which is meaning itself. If you make your meaning clear, no matter any mistakes, you've gotten where you need to go. In fact, mistakes can contribute to meaning, in a way that the grammar police (GP) often elide. In On Sublimity, Longinus writes that hyperbaton, a linguistic tactic sure to make the GP squirm,

"consists in an order of words or thoughts thrown out of the natural sequence, which conveys a very real impression of impassioned earnestness. For when actually angry or terrified or vehemently excited either by rivalry or by any other of the innumerable, indescribable host of human passions, under such circumstances men quit their path, when they have begun with one thing frequently spring off to another, interpose parentheses without any connection, then wheel back again to the original subject, are torn suddenly this way and that by their excitement acting like a fitful wind, and, in short, invert in a hundred different ways the words, the thoughts, the order, out of the natural sequence." (85)

What a beautiful example of meaning expressed by demonstration, of the capacity of language to stretch beyond all the rules we try to impose, forgetting that language is an unsquishable force, utterly and subtly resistant to our attempts to reify ourselves as its creators, outside and above, rather than admit that we all grope our way through it, at times successfully, and, at times, with little forward progress.

Success is not good grammar, though. Good grammar often enables success. Just as often, however, talking about good grammar distracts us from the actual conversation at hand and blinds us to all the wonderful things bad grammar can do. No matter how perfect the opening two paragraphs of this mind-dump, their vague nouns and lack of connection to reality don't create meaning any more than do dangling whatchamadoozits and unnecessary etymologies. So please don't ask me if your grammar is correct. That's not my job. Ask me instead if our conversation makes meaning and I'll happily explain what meaning means to me and what wonderful meaning you make.