UPFRONT:WHAT WITH The Day only days away, I'm supposed to be making lists. You know, the kind of to-do lists through which one proceeds with organisational vigour, tickity-ticking off tasks on completion. This, I have it from reliable sources, is what the Organised Bride should be doing right this minute, in fact. Making lists. On paper. To ensure all goes according to plan and like clockwork. Actually, she should probably be checking items off her list: dance-floor insurance, check; back-up generator, check; Spanx, check.
It’s not that I’m averse to lists. On the contrary, I am most partial to the neatly written list, that friend to the amnesiac and beacon of order in an unruly world. I would go so far as to say I believe in lists, in their restorative properties, in their calming influence, and the way they impose some semblance of control on the otherwise chaotic. But somehow the gap between my mind’s anxious internal patter and a legible, tickable, physical list is too yawning for the likes of me.
My lists, see, come to me late at night, when there’s no pen and paper to hand. They are just a running order of things I have yet to accomplish rolling through my head like film credits. In such sleepless moments the lists appear, not as a representation of the order to be imposed on the day ahead, but as ghoulish reminders of all I’ve failed to complete thus far.
Then daybreak, and it’s all I can do to find my keys and remember my own name, let alone recall the list of yesternight. Which is why you’re supposed to write lists down, I gather. But come on – write it down? Are you having me on? Don’t you list-makers understand? It’s not that the unlisted among us are unable to put pen to paper, exactly. It’s the want of a pen! The lack of paper! Even if, through some strange serendipity, both come together at the right time in the right moment, and we somehow marshal all those meandering thoughts long enough to write them down in something approximating order, what happens then? What does one do with the resulting piece of paper? Keep it about one’s person to be ticked and checked until the last item is neatly crossed and the rest of one’s life marked as down time? If only.
We listless types – not that kind of listless, though there may be some correlation, come to think of it – make listers tear their hair out. We return from supermarkets without the washing powder, without toilet paper, but with trolley-loads of spontaneously purchased surprises, which often consist of cans of beans to be later stacked alongside the existing stacks of bean cans, while the laundry basket overflows and nobody gets to use the bathroom.
The truth is, I do see the value of a good list – there’s a lot to be said for loo roll, after all. Besides, Santa was a list-maker (he checked them twice, remember?) and it’s hard to knock a guy who gives presents for a living.
It’s just that there’s something about the culture of listing – not that kind of listing, though there might be some correlation there too – that makes me a little queasy. Because lists, in order, in reverse order, in chronological order, in order of popularity, may make information digestible and succinct, but only because they leave out so much of the good stuff. Like, for example, the rest of the sentences – all those orphaned clauses clinging sadly to bullet points or digits, without proper context, a backstory, or even a paragraph to pull them all together.
Yet lists are marching on, ubiquitous as ever, while the days of the full sentence are increasingly numbered. It’s tempting to blame the internet (it’s always tempting to blame the internet) and its pithy phraseology and link-clicking listage, as it stealthily spreads the newest and deadliest strain of list: the list of favourites.
Just look to Facebook and such sites for the sudden omnipresence of this particular oxymoron. The invitation to list one’s “favourite TV programmes” is enough to turn any right-minded individual from lists for life. Listen up, Mr Facebook Zuckerberg: you can’t have plural and favourite in the same sentence. Favourites don’t belong in lists. There’s only one favourite. That’s kind of the point, you idiot millionaire.
Yet still they multiply, the lists of favourites alongside the top-10 lists and the A-lists and the B-lists and the to-do lists (ye gods, it’s a list of lists!) as lists and list-makers in their ordered, top-to-bottom way, take over the world. Doesn’t it make you just a little heart-sore for some unplanned, inefficient meandering now and again?
Perhaps not. Perhaps because you know, in your back-sleeping, list-making way, that without the list, that scaffold of civilization, all would be lost. That without a list-maker at the helm (known in this particular context as a Wedding Planner, to bring things full circle), The Day, just days away is doomed.
Well fear not, list-makers of the world: all is not lost, nor is this unnamed event completely list-free. I have pulled off a guest-list after all. I’m just not guaranteeing toilet roll.