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.