QUEEN OF LIST-MAKING

Proverbs 7:4 "Say to wisdom, 'You are my sister,' and call understanding your intimate friend."

Lists are my favorite and very necessary pals... They have saved me from so many over-sight issues, faux pas, and brain-wracking efforts. And still, I get myself into trouble. I tried making bread in the fool-proof breadmaker and messed up twice in a row. Back in High School, I was ALWAYS redoing my science experiments. They never once worked. And I should have failed Home Ec. I realized that I needed to check each list item more than Santa. At the very least, 3 times.

But without a list, I would be extra-doomed. I can so easily become distracted. If there isn’t something to distract me, I make something up. Or, my brain will take off all on its own, and I completely “go away.” When I “come back”, I KNOW I was thinking, but I have no idea about what.

To cope, I find myself hyper-thinking – going into the zone – deep, deep into the heart of the issue. This is when I have to start making my notes and lists. I have made lists for just about everything. I have lists for groupings of lists. I should really have a master list, but I figure, “Eh, I’ve made it pretty obvious, OR some things will just be a surprise when I stumble onto them later.”

Some of the lists are just crazy! Like logging all the movies I’ve ever seen (which is currently well over 3,000). And now that I’ve tracked these for this long, it is a compulsion that I cannot give up. I got rid of my binder at around the one thousand mark and entered all the recorded data into a spreadsheet. I am so thankful for the computer. I can effectively file all lists without any paper-clutter. Still, when my husband comes across a piece of paper with odd scribbling, he leaves it alone. He knows full well that it is probably something important – something that I have yet to add to my computer-list-collection.

I must say, some of my list ideas are pretty awesome. Some are extremely quirky. Below, I’m going to add some of them to the comment boxes. I look forward to seeing some of your ideas, not that I need to be encouraged.