Thursday, December 18, 2008

Lists, for Fun

During a recent and long airport/airline day, I created some lists in my journal. If you ever want to amuse yourself, it's good brain-play.

Stuff I Feel I've Sufficiently Noticed/Appreciated/Cherished Thus Far in Life

--the lyrical magic of my neighbor's wind chimes
--the experience of waiting for the mail
--people's accents and dialects
--soap, all kinds
--urban legends
--conspiracy theories
--the aroma of pipes and cigars
--leftovers
--pumice and obsidian
--airplane magazines
--the game of trying to figure out the opposites of various things (for instance: alibi; confession, etc. What
would be the opposite of a projectile?)
--the phrase "What say...?" but only if uttered by people other than myself
--the courage of immigrants
--metaphors and similes
--imaginary friends
--spelling
--chewing gum
--the idea of the "crack" of dawn--is this visual or auditory?
--fissures and cracks--their velocities, trajectories, webbing, etc.
--Dance Dance Revolution
--the face
--the experience of reading books in which people have scrawled their comments and reactions--the more vehement, the better
--altitude sickness

Life Stuff to Which I Have Only Kind of Vaguely Paid Attention, and Should Have Appreciated More

--occasional insomnia
--interruptions, hesitations, awkward pauses--they exude an odd and particular integrity
--betweenness of various kinds
--cell mitosis
--the experience of moving from one medium to another (air to water, for instance, or sweet to salty)
--dogearing book pages
--the idea of various "final frontiers"
--the many varieties of phrases that use the word "dog," all of which completely beyond the comprehension of
of actual dogs: "dog-tired," "dog-eat-dog world," "hangdog," etc.
--glaciation
--the action of stoking a fire
--the word "fortnight"
--Canada
--the compact loveliness of passports
--surreptitiously attempting to glimpse what strangers are reading
--the coexistence in time of all places near and far
--the experience of locating your flight gate and then exploring the rest of the airport

Stuff I Wouldn't Miss If It Completely Vanished

--survival of the fittest
--pickpockets
--exhaust fumes
--pen disasters (leakages, explosions, etc.)
--bad erasers

And at this point, the list ends--my plane must have arrived!

I'd be happy to read other people's lists of any kind!

1 comment:

Anastasia Theodoridis said...

Taking up your interesting challenge, I wrote out a partial list of things incompatible with democracy, but I put it on my own blog, at:
http://anastasias-corner.blogspot.com/2008/12/partial-list-of-things-incompatible.html