I’ve recently taken to making lists. Of everything. Top 5 favourite looks this season, top 5 favorite fashion designers (I mean, duh… Fashion is everything), top 5 favourite food, top 5 favourite songs (for the hour), top 5 favourite paintings, top 5 favourite women, top 5 favourite cultures, top 5 favourite animals … It goes on. Of course, the items listed are subject to change, and change pretty often and in contradictory ways at that. But I’ve found lists useful for these reasons:
- Purpose of identity
We live in a time where our senses are constantly bombarded with new information. It’s become quite a challenge for me to make sense of and effectively filter these new influences that are coming into my life 24/7 via the Internet (biggest offender), books, movies, billboards, and people. Narrowing down, or at least writing down my personal likes/dislikes/beliefs/whatever helps me to remember who I am at the core of it all, as I dabble in the sea of information at such an impressionable age.
As much as we want to know it all and be a part of everything, a person has only so much time and energy. The harsh reality is that we only get 5 GB of free storage on iCloud and not everyone can afford to upgrade to a larger storage plan.
- Organize yo self before you wreck yo self
If we’ve hung out before, I probably pissed you off by arriving 0.5-2 hours after our agreed meet up time and then proceeded to confuse you with my conversation style, which is haphazard, sarcastic and mostly incoherent. The only people I seem to get along with really well are those who are able to switch their brains off and cast some logic aside to just enjoy the ride.
My thoughts are scattered all over the place so the less I say is better, and sometimes, when I really want to impress someone, I don’t say a thing. To date, I’ve never actually successfully impressed anyone by pretending to be a mute, so I try to do this thing where I murmur some words or phrases and don’t elaborate further. “Bitter gourd.” “Corduroy originated from the French.” “Square watermelons easier to stack.” “Calculator.”
At worst, people think I’m aloof. At best, people think I’m mysterious. Which are perfect adjectives to be labeled when you’re a teenager, striving to be anything but normal and mediocre (read: boring), but not exactly the kind of words you’d want to be associated with when you’re an adult and your life goal has shifted from getting a boyfriend to getting a job.
- Better gifts from your boyfriend. And everyone else
My boyfriend has a superb memory and commendable attention to details. I’m not even joking when I say that he can repeat our conversations from 4 years ago without a blink. It’s creepy and amusing. But mostly heartwarming when someone remembers what you were wearing the first time you guys went out to watch a movie together, or when someone picks up on the “I’m so hungry” that you whined casually and unthinkingly and then appears in your office lobby with your favorite sushi 20 minutes later.
I’ve never dog-eared pages or circled handbags in catalogs before placing them strategically on my bedside table, specifically because I don’t have a bedside table and also find this method to be a bit rude and direct. But news flash, we aren’t the center of the universe and the sun definitely doesn’t shine out of our arses. (Ikr? Relax. Calm down... It took me about 5 weeks to come to terms with this.) Not everyone is going to remember that we adore anything floral print, collect pretty rocks, LOVE (like, seriously, L.O.V.E.) Jean-Baptiste Maunier or even notice that we do yoga 6 days a week.
Sometimes amid the frenzy and chaos that comes with buying gifts for others, particularly around the season of Christmas, a simple list of your “Top 5 favourite things” could go a long way in saving all parties involved some money and disappointment.
Lists aren’t limited to your ‘top 5 favourite whatever’, but that’s a good start if you’re at a lost as to how to go about creating your list. I’ve got lists entitled “People I wish I could punch in the face”, “The Pros and Cons of dating a person of a different race”, “Smells I like”, and the ever so common “Groceries to buy” and “To do”.
Some are more interesting than others. “All the boys I’ve ever kissed”, was one I started at the age of 16 after I’d just suffered the greatest heartbreak of our time. I was going through a self-destructive phase with my new hobby of getting tipsy and kissing boys and was beginning to lose track of whom I’d locked lips (and hips. Ha ha ha. Jk) with.
“Evidence that my brothers love me” is a strange list to have, but my brothers did hava a weird way of showing me their affection that consisted largely of physical torture and verbal taunting. This raised genuine concerns and doubts within me if the rumor about our parents decision to name me Justine in honor of the fact that they'd found me in the dustbin was indeed true.
Another notable list is “Daily food log”, which was a Word document that I’d updated faithfully over a period of two years in my late teens. It’s long and detailed, and I’m embarrassed to admit that it’s the most committed I’ve ever been to anything. Although I haven’t managed to completely shake off the habit of counting my calories till today, the obsession is gone (haha. I think) and more importantly, the list no longer has the power to make me feel bad about myself.
New list: “Memories of losing it while losing weight”
- Freaking out and being completely distraught and consumed with guilt and self-depreciating thoughts whenever my daily caloric intake creeped into the thousands – which is totally normal, FYI.
- Imagining the olive oil (extra virgin, of course) from my salad collecting in a crater (huh?) of my stomach and then conjugating into the awful jelly substance, cellulite. The inspiration for this phenomenon came about after I’d observed a cloudy top layer of oil had solidified in a pot of chicken soup after sitting overnight in our refrigerator.
- Shuddering at the thought of touching butter, believing that it would seep through the pores on my fingers. God knows how many calories that’d be. And for what?! I wouldn’t even get to taste it.
- Getting into fights with my mom at our dinner table on a daily basis, whenever she tried to force anything that wasn’t raw lettuce down my throat. Have you seen a Chinese mom’s cooking? Sesame oil, soy sauce, gooey brown gravy, a bunch of other weird stuff. I’d interrogate her with questions like “how many teaspoons of sugar did you use?” and “was it refined sugar or raw sugar?” It truly was a dark and perplexing time when sugar scared me more than lizards.
New list: “Retrospective analysis of having an odd diet”
- I did not study biology. Obviously. Or nutritional science, for that matter. But for some reason saw myself fit to make the inaccurate assumption that a bowl of lettuce tossed in olive oil and balsamic vinegar was a nutritious enough meal and that 1.5 tablespoons of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey would cost me 200 kcal.
- My imagination is twisted and I’ve a long history of using it unproductively to my disadvantage.
- Nobody wants to bone someone who looks like an undernourished child from the third world.
- I won't die from some pasta and cupcake frosting. Fried carrot cake from the hawker center is actually really delicious. Who would’ve guessed?
Life is uncertain and people are complicated. Listing priorities/beliefs/likes/dislikes/pros/cons may not be the most dynamic representation of an individual or a situation, but it’s a good indication and provides a useful overview of what to expect. Go forth and make lists because simplifying things never harmed nobody and is actually super handy at times.
