I love making a good list.

As doing a makeover is for Cher in Clueless, writing a to do list gives me a sense of control in a world full of chaos.

It’s neat, it’s orderly and it’s a suitably restrained form of optimism: with its lofty hopes for a future and structure projections of all the things you might achieve in the time beyond now.

At some point in the week, or even possibly last week (it’s very hard to keep track of the days at the moment; it’s almost like time has become a mushed clump of wet calendar pages instead of the crisp, easy-to-distinguish units of time we once lived our lives within) I had a little brain spurt and wrote down a bunch of all the things I was hoping to achieve with my spare time. Something I could refer back to when staring down empty chunks of times to fill that void with fun, productive activity and, dare I say it, a sprinkle of relaxation. This list was, in the back of my head, a lifeline to prevent me from frittering away this free time.

All through the week I was scraping by from day to day thanks to a stretch of 3.30am alarms and a very scattered, restless sleep pattern, I found myself just kind of… existing. I wasn’t really in a state to be ticking off to do lists and was far too disorientated from the after work naps I apparently couldn’t avoid to do all that much. But I figured I’d really start living on the weekend, which I was lucky enough to have this week. I’d go through the list and I would feel productive and happy and relaxed and everything would be just dandy.

Today I was faced with a several empty hours to fill. I was a little bit dusty but otherwise still largely capable of engaging in most recreational ventures, so I thought I would refer back to this list full of endless cool shit to do.

I opened the Word doc that contained said list. I’d obviously written it as the scaffolding for a column and left it unfinished for a more inspired and energised version of myself to complete. As it turns out, this moment of inspiration and energy never came, because I was thoroughly underwhelmed with what I had written down, which was:

Try soaking my feet in port:There was an sales rep I used to work with back at the Armidale paper who reckons that you could get absolutely blind by soaking your feet in port. There’s something to do with the perfect level of alcohol in that it’s not too high that your body needs to expel it from your system but not too weak that if doesn’t make you go all loopy. I’m curious and interested in broadening my horizons, so I’m wanting to give this a try.  

Watch The Ten Commandments:It was on TV the other night and only got from the part where he was horny, preppy Moses to juuusut before he started fucking shit up. I mean, the movie is three hours and 40 minutes long and when you throw ad breaks into the mix, it’s a marathon. But my goal is to watch it from start to finish, especially because I got a tantalising snippet of Nefretiri, who is extremely glamorous and extra and vengeful and just all around fabulous. 

Re-watch all the Olsen twins movies:

That was it. That was the list.

I was three things.

I had written a list of three things. I mean, lists of three things don’t need to be lists because they can fit into a sentence without being a clunky mess. There’s no need for the formatting of a list because one comma and an “and” would have been enough.

Basically, my big goals for myself were to get drunk without consuming calories and spending hours watching TV.

And, unfortch, I don’t have a bucket of port on hand and the Olsen twin movies aren’t on Netflix. I also don’t feel emotionally ready to watch three hours and forty minutes of a single movie.

So I made another loaf of bread. Today’s is apricot, pecan and self distain. I reckon it’ll go great with a cup of tea.