List Making

I am an inveterate list maker. I keep a pad of paper on my dresser and sometimes I'll get up five times in a night to add another thing onto my list of things to do the next day. I used to keep lists of books I read in a given year, comics I wanted to buy with my next paycheck, girls I kissed, places I've been, favorite words, etc. This tendency comes out here on my blog with entries about Stuff I Love, Firsts, and things like that.

I teach list making as a writing strategy to composition students. People who complain "I never know what to write about" (which is a valid, frequent concern) can start by making a list of potential topics. Write down every possible thing you think you may want to address in your essay. You're not married to any one idea -- just get them down on paper. Even if your list only ends up being 5 items long, that's still probably 4 more ideas than you would have had before making the list. Then the struggling writer suddenly has an abundance of choices instead of the dead-end of just one. Lists are generative - the more you list, the more you can list. Ideas come into your brain like waves washing onto a beach. Two or three ideas will come, you'll think you're dry, and then another two or three will just roll up out of nowhere. It's kind of cool and magical.

Lists themselves are wonderful because they have a way of organizing and structuring your world. Everything is in black and white and is brought down to a manageable size when it's confined to a small slip of paper on my dresser.

Anyway, the point of all this (and I do have one) is that my pop quiz from yesterday stems from a kind of list I used to keep when I was in college. At Ricks College, I majored in Angst with a minor in Woe Is Me. I also took several classes in Impotent Rage and did really well. Anyway, I spent those years wandering around in my stupid trench coat, carrying my black and white journal everywhere I went, writing lengthy, angry entries about angry things. One kind of list I used to keep was "People I Cannot Do Without." It sounds silly to write it now but it basically a list of my friends and family members that I loved, trusted, and felt I could rely on. Conversely, I also kept a list of "People I Can Do Without." It featured people that bothered me, that I found annoying, that made me mad. That list usually featured whatever girl I was mad at that week, whatever kid in class I thought was dorky, whatever professor that had a tic that I thought was irritating, etc. Not very charitable, eh?

Well, I don't really keep those lists now. (Progress!) But it did occur to me the other day when Entertainment Tonight was on as I was washing dishes that I really, really, really don't like Celine Dion. She just bothers me. Her music is bombastic, overdone, and treacly. She's skeletal-looking and creepy and, from every interview I've ever seen with her, she's amazingly self-involved. My personal world would be better without her.

And so I started thinking who else I would put on the list of "People I Can Do Without." I don't want to spend any time going down the list because nobody needs that kind of negativity on a Wednesday afternoon. The pictures speak for themselves. You know they're on my list and I like to think that somehow, through some kind of cosmic notification system, they know it too.

P.S. The last photo is, as Clark correctly identified, Neal Conan, host of NPR's Talk of the Nation.

P.P.S. Tracy, Tawnya, and Angela's answers all made me laugh out loud like a braying donkey.