- to - live - an - itemized - life WORDS Meredith Stisser VISUALS Queenn Mckend
There are few things that imbue me with as much satisfaction as the violent drag of a ballpoint pen across a to-do list. That sense of accomplishment is a high I chase every morning. I wake up and crawl from my bed to my dorm desk, and markup a yellow index card with: -take vitamins -drink 1 hydroflask -stretch -get dressed -civil rights hw -call mom -apply for internships -go to roche bros. The visual of the completed list is divine. A metaphorical diploma, I graduated from this day, from these tasks, I escaped the perils of unproductivity yet again, ha! My personal subscription to capitalist demands for constant motion. These lists give me a sense of control, a feeling of feigned productivity in the simple act of creating them. At their core, they serve as one of the many distractions I feed myself to satiate the hunger to analyze the menial nature of any life, to protect the complete illusion that we have purpose and obligation. The list keeps me sane, I am 25 a collection of lists of completed tasks, of secrets and passwords, of fears and goals. My lists allow a sense of self-curation. A solid sense that I would otherwise be denied. I carefully congregate all of the manifestations I pursue onto tidy 3x5 notecards, or on the corners of notebooks, the backs of napkins, perhaps cataloged in my secret Pages documents that I only open at 3 AM when I’m under the influence of love or other drugs. I build a home around myself. Walls of paper and scribbles and checkmarks. I keep lists of things I’m going to put in my apartment (when I get an apartment), lists of the kind of person I will allow myself to fall in love with, (as if that is healthy at all), a list of every place on Earth I want to see before I am buried inside of it. Some of my lists are unhealthy, lists of everything I’ve eaten on a given day to remind myself of my calorie count, lists of all of the things pressing on my anxieties. In a chilling way, the lists I make construct the person that I am. I best express the essence of myself when I offer you a peek into my obsession, my addiction to the perpetual incentives built into living an itemized life. So, here are my lists.
