List-mania

My mom is one of those listmaker-types who can’t remember or won’t do anything that is not written in black-and-white. I think she just gets high off of crossing things off the list.

I’ve tried to be one of those people — I make lists all the time. On Friday night, before I left work, I wrote down things I needed to buy or to do … and promptly forgot the piece of paper on which I’d written them. This included something that I needed to do this morning — and not just WHAT to do, but HOW to do it.

I remembered the WHAT part — mission accomplished. But I did it the wrong way. The end result was achieved, although the methodology was circumvented. And a lesser person would argue that, screw it, the effect was achieved despite being half-awake. But I of course take it as a great opportunity to beat myself up learn from it.

I drive myself nuts some times — I either have hyper-attention to detail or no awareness whatsoever. And I even get a nagging feeling, like I know something’s off, but the longer I stare at something, the less likely I am to figure it out. Until, of course, it’s too late. Like, take my bank account — I managed to bounce it sky-high again. Because I am an idiot like that. I wrote down about half of my transactions — like, isn’t that enough? Why do I have to be thorough with that? But I am so thorough with, say, writing something that I will obsess over it for hours until it’s perfect. And nobody notices that but me. Why was I born to obsess over the “wrong” things but to completely screw up what “matters”?

On iTunes: Garbage, “Milk (Wicked Mix)”

One Lonely Response to List-mania

  1. Anonymous :

    I coined a term for that lack of awareness, because my son has a chronic case of it. “Obliviot”. Everyone suffers from it once in a while.

    Ted