Colour me Rad: Thinking Inside the Box.

So it’s January.  A time of new beginnings…resolutions…big big plans.  And I am all about lists.  I mean, ALL about them.  I use coloured markers.  I make boxes that I can check off.  People look at my whiteboard and go—“Why don’t you just erase things once you’re done?”   What’s wrong with you?   If I erased things on my list, I couldn’t check the little box.  I couldn’t have the satisfaction of looking at a list of little checked boxes: things accomplished.  I couldn’t keep at bay (however briefly) the feeling that time is sucking away my youth and potential while I watch Downton Abbey and make off-colour remarks on twitter. 

I mean, Downton Abbey is a very good show.  But in advance of making my 2012 goals (two weeks into January, because I have not yet resolved to be on time for things), I pulled out my 2011 goals and with the exception of “get a new agent,” and  “start using twitter,” I can’t check anything off.  Now, I have started many of the things on my list, and that’s not nothing.  But I want tangible progress.  I want little boxes with big red checks.

So great is my desire for the checked box, that in highschool for a period of several weeks to several months, I made lists every night before I went to bed and they included

 Wake up

Shower

Get Dressed

Eat Breakfast

Brush Teeth

Do Hair.

I’m not kidding.  And I know it borders on OCD, but I left for school feeling like a champion.  You wanna feel good about yourself?  Set the bar very low.

I am not a naturally organized person.  In fact my sister said “I don’t know why you bother making all these lists.  As soon as they’re done, you lose them.”  And she’s right, I do.  But the writing of the list does a great deal to quell my anxiety and move the chaos from my head to the page.  Lists are plans.  Steps you can take.  Progress you can make.

Annie Dillard writes “A schedule defends from chaos and whim.  It is a net for catching days.  It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.” (The Writing Life, 32).  So too with lists.  And being that I am self-employed creative person, my need for structure and scaffolding is great. 

So I make lists and I colour-code my Moleskine Agenda.  That’s right.  I sit down in January, and put all my family birthdays in (lime green text with a baby blue cloud around it, or vice versa); I write in anniversaries and upcoming weddings (alternating orange and red); I flip to the end of every month and write “PAY RENT” two days before it’s due (colour not decided yet because colour-coding your agenda takes a significant amount of time and I’m waiting till I catch up on The New Girl.)  And I LOVE this.  I love looking at this year in front of me that starts to have some edges and walls.  It’s like the week or month or year ahead is a ski hill and I’m deciding where to plant my poles.

But that’s about as far as the excitement takes me.  It’s like buying your books at the beginning of the semester and looking at your syllabus—that part is exciting; writing the 20 page paper at the end…less so.  Or as a kid—I loved building the fort, or dressing up my sisters and brother as settlers (and once making Larissa be the horse to draw the buggy), or setting up the “grocery store” with empty boxes of cereal and Kraft Dinner my mom had saved for us…but then, I was done.  Once we were all set up, I no longer wanted to “play.” I mean, how do you even play house, or fort, or grocery store.  There are no rules!  No plot!

But just as with life, you need to play, do, improvise.  You need fill the space between.  It’s all fine and good to write “Complete Spec Script” or “Come up with a pilot idea” or “Write a blog a week”…but then you have to do that.  You need to sit at your computer and make shit happen. 

Now, I’m not above micro-managing myself…

  Sit down at desk.

  Turn on computer.

  Open word document.

But at a certain point there is the work that cannot be cudgeled into being.  That’s a real word.  I thought I made it up, but it’s right there in my dictionary: cudgeled.  You must build a scaffold, a schedule or a list…and then you must build, do, fill.  And that makes me go…eeecccgggghhh.   

And “eeecccggggghhh” pretty much explains how I’ve felt all of January so far.  All these dreams, plans, potential…I want to be excited…I want to have done many of those things…but the doing…the doing….eeecccgggghhh.  Plus, I start to think “and then what?”  So I finish my Spec Script.  So I write a hilarious short film.  So I finally finish my animation voice-over demo. Then what?  Will my life be complete?  Probably not.  But it will be complete-er.  That’s not a word.  Don’t even bother looking it up.

So I am here.  And I am writing a blog.  And then I’ll go to Yoga.  And then I’ll watch me some Zooey Deschanel while I finish colour-coding my agenda.  2012, look out.  I got me a WHOLE buncha boxes lined up.

           

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