ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Earlier this fall, I started reading this blog pretty regularly. After a while, I figured out that the author had some kind of list of stuff she wanted to do, which intrigued me because a) I am obsessed with lists and b) in late 2005 I made a big list of things I wanted to do and then never really went anywhere with it. What fascinated me so much about this list was that it was highly specific and had a set deadline that gave you a lot more to work with than just a year. When all the dust had settled after I left my old job, and I’d had time to get situated in my new one, I went back and looked at the project more closely.

Anybody who knows my strong passion for lists understands how completely I began to obsess over the whole concept at that point. So I started working on a 101 things list of my own.

I put a lot of thought into the whole thing. To get some ideas, I reviewed probably over a hundred lists written by other people to see if there were any amazing list items I might not have thought of on my own. This was almost as much fun as writing my own list. Most people come up with things pretty similar to each other. I can’t even begin to relate how many “get a pedicure” or “go backpacking in Europe” items I read.

My favorite part of reading all these people’s lists was coming up with the little odd quirks that did make some of them very unique. One person wrote, “Ride a horse (NOT a pony)”, which interested me. Why the strong prejudice against ponies? Lots of people wanted to ride a horse. No one else bothered to specify that it couldn’t be a pony. It makes me curious about the story behind it, if there is one. Another person wrote, “Declare bankruptcy”, which struck me as sort of funny/sad on its own, but it came right before a bunch of other fairly big ticket items, including “Visit Disneyland”. So are they supposed to declare bankruptcy after they rack up all this debt doing their list, or what?

I started to run dry on ideas toward the end. Part of my difficulty stemmed from having to come up with a finite number of things, but a finite number that was so large. It was tough to come up with a lot of things without getting redundant, but it was also tough to narrow all my random thoughts down to just 101 that were important enough to spend the next three years working on. So I made my last list item a wild card. I’ll keep track of everything I think of later that I wish I’d added to the list, pick one to do, and save the rest in case I do this project again sometime.

I decided to start my list next Tuesday on January 1, but I can already feel myself champing at the bit to get started. I guess if I cheat and start early, I’ll just bump the start date up.