L is for List Making

CHARLES HOPKINS
Volume 1, Issue 7 (Originally Published on 16 April 2012)
 
On the Saturday before last, I made a list. It contained all the things I needed to complete during the Easter break. Yesterday I made another list. It contained all the things I’d failed to complete during the Easter break.
 
Those lists are identical.
 
My law-student life is indexed by these sorts of lists. They serve as reminders of my repeated failures, like the “participation certificates” from high school chess-club that still line the inner sides of my bedroom cupboard doors.
 
Every semester I make grand plans for the break, and every break I avoid study by watching all the music videos released in the preceding 3 months (the video for ‘Call Me Maybe’ is actually like a 3 minute lolfest, omg step asyd Avril Lavrigne cuz Carley Rae is lyk the hottest bitch from Canadia ryt now).
 
If we assume that any list is aspirational and that nothing on the list will actually get done (which applies to all of mine, including that list of evidence I was meant to destroy before my impending manslaughter trial this week), then the only function of the list is to remind us of our laziness. It’s like how tattoos of anything serve as a constant reminder of being a douche. Which would make a tattoo of a list a doubly potent reminder of lazy- douche-ness.
 
Imagine if Jesus had written a bucket list before Easter Friday: he would have returned on the Sunday to a stone tablet iPad-equivalent with three reminders, only one of which he’d actually done: “ensure my legacy is recorded in one unifying text rather than three conflicting ones, check the results of Mary’s pregnancy test, and check where the fish are in the Sea of Galilee so I can look cool and Jesus-like when I tell the boys where to cast their nets.”
 
The solution? Don’t make lists! You’ll still fail at doing stuff, but you’ll do so in relatively short-term, ignorant bliss!
 
I guess the other solution is that you write lists and actually do the stuff... but then you have to do the stuff...
 
So I stand by my initial suggestion. From here on in you only need this list:
1. Never make or read lists other than those permitted under list item 2 

2. This list 

3. Buy milk and bread. 

 
Charles Hopkins recently launched a blog ‘textsfromJulianAssange’, but it got pulled down by governments of every developed nation. 
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