Expired Relevance
I’m a habitual list-maker. Cleaning up my desk and perpetually seemingly-hurricane-stricken office always yields small piles of post-its with notes I’ve written to myself: to-do lists; names and phone numbers and addresses; small phrases that inspire a story I didn’t have time to write; spontaneous categorization that is forgotten as soon as it’s recorded; doodles and diagrams, etc.
Many of them I feel I need to keep at least until I compile the data and ideas somewhere more permanent. Notes scribbled with expired relevance can be safely thrown away. Sometimes I’ll come across a note that isn’t easy to categorize because I don’t know what it means. Take this one that I found tonight:
Paper
Stationery
Blog about
Story prompt
Top Priority
That’s it. I can tell you that I wrote this note sometime in the fall, but I’ve forgotten why. Paper could mean anything. Stationery could indicate that this is a “to buy” list since I’ve had somewhat recent thoughts about what a shame it is that I don’t hand-write letters anymore and perhaps having some decent stationery would change that.
(All the stationery I have is a few holdover pieces from my childhood that I could use ironically, but would otherwise defeat the purpose and feel of real stationery that reflects who I am today.)
But the inclusion of the action words Blog about confuse me. Blog about what? Stationery? Or a Story prompt? And what is Top Priority? Why is that at the bottom of the list? I have no idea, and I’ve been mulling it over in the back of my head for a couple hours now. I don’t believe it will come to me.
And so I’ve placed that post-it note in the recycling bin to make room for future lists and ideas—hoping that its meaning was simply displaced instead of being lost forever.
