Ramblings

Free Write Friday: Lists

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I’m the kind of person who likes to make lists. Grocery lists, to-do lists, lists for work tasks, home tasks, personal tasks, lists of things I should do today and this week and this year and this lifetime. Yellow post-it notes litter my work desk, stuck to my computer monitor, clogging up the fabric tackboard mounted along one wall. I’ve tried different techniques in the past to manage my lists, but paper is still my preferred method. My purse is peppered with scraps torn from a gardening store mailer or a cafe napkin, reminding me to pick up milk and tampons and cough drops on my way home. We have an app now to keep the convoluted family schedule straight, each of five family members assigned their own contrasting color, but the to-do list blankly staring back from a palm-held screen doesn’t work well for me. I forget to check it, there isn’t the same satisfaction with crossing off, tossing a scrap of paper, purging the item from my mind and my day.

Sometimes I’ll find an old list in a rarely-used purse or backpack. I’ll remember that particular week, the mundane tasks I felt were so urgent, so important at that time. Order cupcakes for my son’s birthday, send that email to my boss, finish editing an essay for the submission deadline looming, now long past. Once I found an old list from my wedding, the endless tasks for that momentous event crossed out carefully. There were a few things still left, that never got done. There always are. 

I’m the kind of person who likes to color code. I’m a splitter, not a lumper. In medical school I had an infamous binder: two inch white with a clear slotted cover, brightly colored tabbed dividers for each course. Red for Histology, green for Pathophysiology, orange for Intro to Clinical Medicine. I had a separate binder for Anatomy; all those organs and nerves and blood vessels, origins and insertions of muscles to memorize: they deserved their own separate filing. Colored pencils used to sketch out each organ, each nerve pathway, the sequence of events mapped out for optimal memorization. 

I’m the kind of person who likes to plan for every contingency. Futile, I know. Futile, I’ve realized. Futile, I still plan meticulously, despite knowing better. Now, I at least have the realism to not expect as much from my planning, know it all may be in vain, know that lists and organization and planning ahead only achieves calm for the now. Eventually chaos ensues and chaos, despite best laid plans, ultimately reigns.

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Ramblings

Free Write Friday: Mail

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My mom used to send me magazine clippings in the mail. She’d come across an article about medicine or my old high school or our family summer vacation locale and she’d clip it and staple it and send it off in a nondescript white envelope. I’d receive the envelope, neat looped handwriting instantly recognizable, and I’d open it right away. The newspaper clipping or torn magazine sheets usually went into a pile meant to be read later. 

But I was in college, trying to keep up with a rigorous load of textbooks and essays and journal articles. Or I was in medical school, busy with anatomy lab and pathology and pharmacology, drowning in index cards and color coded diagrams meant to aid memorization of muscle insertion and organ innervation. Or I was in residency, distracted with an eighty hour work week and a new husband and new home and new reality of responsibility for very sick patients. Or I was traveling, studying abroad or working internationally, sorting through the complexities of the injustices and richness and suffering and beauty I encountered in the greater world and trying to determine my place in it all. So into a pile they went.

Sometimes I’d come across one much later, still folded neatly, pale yellow post-it with mom’s personal commentary attached: “Thought you’d be interested in this! Love, Mom” Sometimes I’d read it or toss it, but usually it went back in the pile. I felt guilty throwing them away; the effort she put in. 

After I got married my husband started receiving the articles too: about bamboo, education, triathlons. He came to recognize the plain white envelopes, the practical script. He started a pile of his own.

I don’t get clippings anymore in my mailbox. She still sends articles, but they’re attached to an email, they’re posted on Facebook. I usually put them in my mental pile of “to read”, same guilt setting in. I realize, though, I miss the paper piles, the tangible envelope pulled from a mailbox. I miss it in the sentimental way old people miss a diner or their favorite hand lotion or Reader’s Digest. The tangible sleekness of magazine pages, the coarse newspaper marking my fingers. My mom’s distinct cursive signaling the envelope, the article, indicating she thought of me, she thinks of me, and wanted me to know.

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