D R A M A_ Q U E E N

Drama Queen for a Day
Wherefore art thou, wierdo? Send us your tales of the strangest declarations of love you've received for a chance to win a $100 gift certificate from barnesandnoble.com.

- - - - - - - - - -

E D I T O R ' S_N O T E

Look for excerpts from Anne Lamott's new book, "Traveling Mercies," on Fridays; Word by Word, Lamott's biweekly Thursday column, will return March 4.

- - - - - - - - - -

T A B L E_T A L K

Dying to brag? Go ahead! Tell the world how great your kids are in theMothers area of Table Talk

ONCE YOU START MAKING LISTS, THEIR TYRANNICAL REIGN OVER YOUR LIFE BECOMES A FATE WORSE THAN DISORGANIZATION.

BY ELIZABETH RAPOPORT

I'm nothing without my lists. Oh, I admit I slack off a bit during the summer months, sneaking items like "Apply Gold Rush polish to toenails" onto my home to-do list and actually misplacing my office list somewhere in my "in" box under back issues of Entertainment Weekly (book research, I swear) for weeks at a time. But with the summer clothes laundered and packed (Item No. 6 on Home List) and the school bus doorshissing open, I crack open a fresh "Things to Do" pad from my personal stash and vow to toughen up. As a working mom, making lists is the only activity I know of that's guaranteed to keep me sane and drive me crazy simultaneously.

At any given time, I'm working two or three lists. I'm deeply passive-aggressive with my office list, where I cannot bring myself even to enter the most hateful tasks: itemizing expense accounts (digging out the restaurant receipts and taxi vouchers that have yielded their carbon-copy secrets to the silty bottom of my purse), writing overduebook flap copy ("adjective, adjective and adjective, this guide is indispensable reading for anyone who verbs"), calling scary literary agents. To this one I bring some feeble attempts at time management gleaned from books I've edited over the years; I officiously separate the "to do" from the "to call," organize relevant phone numbers next to the names and refrain from returning the receiver to the cradle between dialing, thereby shaving precious seconds to apply to more important tasks, by which I mean computer solitaire.

The home list is almost always deceptively short. The simple word "library" may connote cerebral strolls through the stacks but is in fact a frantic search under kids' beds and under seat cushions, then a painstaking match-up between dozens of borrowed books and the computer-generated due slips. "Caldor's" means a trip to middle America hell, where I'll be forced to wrestle a five-foot-diameter kiddie pool through a narrow check-out lane, navigate a sullen gamut of employees in search of the elusive "rain check" or ward off flying elbows in the pitched battles known as "Rubbermaid Days." Certain long-term projects are simply too painful to discuss, let alone list, such as organizing the "photo dump," where family snaps have gathered unceremoniously for the last five and a half years, waiting futilely to be enalbumed. (I've postponed this so long that basically I'm reduced to counting the candles on birthday cakes, remembering which Halloween costumes my kids wore and which years they were likely sporting teething rashes in order to date the photos.)

I always compose these home lists at night before I turn in because whatever I don't write down insinuates itself into my dream life, where I might find myself simultaneously teaching calculus class in the nude and shopping for Sesame Street vitamins at a CVS pharmacy. If I'm too exhausted or lazy to write down the next day's instructions for the baby sitter, a benign direction like "drop Jake off at gymnastics" haunts my nightmares as "drop Jake off cliff" or something similar.

It was my printer hubby who thoughtfully ran up for me a gross of "Things to Do" pads, enough to last me until my retirement in 2024. These suffice for work, but my home lists are created on the back of unopened bank statements, kids' smiley face-bedecked homework (I'm sure you treasure your children's efforts, possibly even frame them; they're toast in my house) or department store receipts.

My artistic-cum-pragmatic husband introduced the concept of placing squares rather than numbers to the left of the items, which can then be filled in with a flourish of a check mark or "X." I like to pad my list the way some folks pad expense accounts, front-loading it with easy, "X"-able items, such as calling girlfriends to dish or checking store hours, to give myself a cheap thrill of accomplishment. (Apparently I'm not alone; my friend Camille has been known to head off her lists with "1. Make list" and to stuff the ballot box with items completed even before the making of said list.)

N E X T_ P A G E: The mother of all home to-do lists