Lists

I decided to change, and it all started when I wrote a 'to-do' list. I've written to-do lists before, especially in college, when a year long procrastinating habit ultimately caught up to my sorry, lazy ass at the end of the semester, and I found myself buried under essay deadlines, cramming for chemistry, or finding a last minute internship for a discipline I wasn't in the least bit interested in. These lists would be written on a ripped out page from a notebook, the edges frayed and tattered. I would fold up the paper twice horizontally, twice vertically, to get eight little rectangles, one box for a day of the week (and the extra box for what to buy at the grocery store). Write essay on a minor poem by Alexander Pope. Check. Study for chemistry. Skip. Do an all-nighter for Chemistry. Skip. Buy coffee and No-Doze. Check. Search usenet for research ideas. Check.

It's strange to think that in those days, the internet was just a novelty. If a particular Chemistry question stumped us, or if we had to critique Alexander Pope's misogyny, we couldn't simply Google it. We had to physically walk to the library during school hours (our lame ass school's library was not open 24 hours), go to the card catalog, look up by author or subject, then hit the stacks (of books). There was no guarantee that the question you had in mind would be found in any particular one book. You had to, OMG, READ it. Or at least scan it. Go through the table of contents. Go to the index. God forbid, go to the bibliography and reference yet another book. It would take at least a week to gather enough materials to even think about skimming. This labyrinthine exercise, this bean counting, this circuitous navigation, much like the sliderule or abacus, is a lost art that generations to come will find difficult to comprehend. For the dateless MUD-heads, geeks, porn addicts, computer science majors, or AD&D players (stress on "Advanced"), the early wayfarers of "the information superhighway", the "inter-net", or the "world wide web", it was not as simple as point-and-click. It was a chaotic, lime green, textual jungle of NN, listservs, majordomos, and nebulous yet ultra-specific named usenet servers with names like alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die. If you were lucky and found a thread on a usenet group which happened to discuss early Eighteenth Century English literature, then you posted a message on the server, waited a day or two, then checked back to see if anyone posted a reply. You'd be lucky if you got a couple replies. And despite being able to utilize all this arcane technical knowledge, the content was never formally presented or articulated, but rather, filled with invectives, sarcastic diatribes, and worst of all, flame wars. But at least it was invectives, sarcastic diatribes, and flame wars about whether Alexander Pope's possible impotence was a case for his misogyny or not. In those days, the internet was largely used by universities, and the content was primarily produced by students, professors, researchers (and sometimes, the government). It predated commercialism. It predated spam. It was a time when there was something called netiquette, which is no more than a vestigial organ of the Victorian internet days.

I would be in the computer lab, trolling the usenet servers for academic threads, one thing to scratch off my primitive, tattered notebook to-do list. If I managed to find that piece of paper again and look to see what else remained on the list of things to do, I would invariably find a little spot, or crease, or mark, which would resemble the shoulder of a woman, or a wheel of a bicycle, or the eye of a monster. I would end up spending at least a half hour extrapolating lines, shading areas, drawing curves, until I filled one of those empty panels (maybe the grocery list one). Of course, I would be situated right next to the digital media and graphics lab in the computer center, and I would feel compelled to use a scanner to scan the sketch into Photoshop, after which I'd spend the next 6 hours doodling on the computer and transforming the artwork into something pretty and pointless. Thus, my to-do list of academic protocols and grocery needs would inevitably transform into a digital and painterly record of my procrastination habits.