A-list

i like to make lists a lot. i think one time when i was a kid, when i was preoccupied with becoming an adult as soon as possible, i heard that it was a good organizational tactic to make lists. and also a good way for a female to make some sense of the primordial stew of craze and evil brewing in her head.

you can make all kinds of lists. shopping lists, of course, and budgets, 'things i want and can't afford,' reasons to go to grad school, places to apply, things to do this week, things to start doing to become a better person...

one time i even made a list about whether or not i should dump my ex. i spent the better part of physics class coming up with a points system, assigning numerical value for everything he did and said, giving more points the more fucked up a particular action or insult happened to be. by the time i finished, i had worn out my TI-82 with the formulae, and i was pissed about all the negative things i had just remembered. he cheated anyway so it worked out.

the other day when i was hungry and dissatisfied with our cupboard inventory, i made a list of all the yummy things i intended to procure from trader joe's. it was only about 9 items long but that's $50 anyway.
i put this list in my bag, to have when sometime this week, i would inevitably think, 'i hate buying groceries. but i hate the gym more right now. time to go to trader joe's.'

this happened today, when i was pit-stained beyond miserable after an hour in traffic with no a/c. so i grabbed my list out of my puma bag and headed for the organic aisles of TJ's. only i realized too late that it was another list, without groceries on it. it was a list of different possibilities of buffers to use for capillary electrophoresis at work. not so helpful when hungry.

part of me was all, well i didn't take my list on purpose. i just wrote it to give me something to do, and i'm smart - i'll remember what's on it. this is kind of like a crossword puzzle of comestibles - what was on my list, and how many of those can i get right without it? and the password is...
so i bought 19 things instead of 9. i'm fairly certain half of the 9 never re-entered the spongy tangle of my PMS-girlbrain. tired of feeling so forgetful, so silly, so female, so downright middle-aged, i tossed a heaping $8 bottle of ginko biloba in my basket.

but that was definitely not on the list.