After deciding, a few years ago, that I want to reduce my use of paper for non-school purposes to a bare minimum, I started accumulating heaps of assorted thoughts, ideas, and notes to myself in various places on my computer and phone. My iPhone’s notes application is full of bank routing numbers, phone numbers without names, the codes to every staircase in Wadham College, and various song lyrics that are waiting to become Facebook statuses. The two stickies I have in my Mac’s Dashboard — one yellow, one green — house various fragments of thoughts (“dominant, negotiated, and oppositional readings” and “red velvet pancakes,” for example), and a list of artists I need to buy on iTunes whenever I get a chance, respectively.
The full-fledged Stickies application is a little more interesting. I use it a lot less frequently than either of the above, but it’s where I write down more involved lists of things. For instance, once my collection of my favorite (unattributed) quotes outgrew the Dashboard, it made its way into a Stickie of its very own:
Along with those quotes, I have an infrequently-used but still up-to-date note that contains a list of everyone close to me that I used to speak with, but no longer do. The list includes every single one of my exes (I apparently don’t subscribe to the “let’s be friends” model of breaking up), most of my close friends from high school, a handful of people who were “internet friends” before I became freaked out by the concept, and five Swarthmore classmates who have ignored my attempts to get in touch with them this year. The total number of people on the list is 22.
Of the 22 who have earned spots on the illustrious list of People Who Used to be Part of Yoel’s Life, only one stopped speaking to me, before I to him. Nine have contacted me within the last six months. As best I can tell, between twelve and twenty of the people on the list read this blog. There are only eleven for whom I remember the reason I stopped speaking to them.
Occasionally, I look at the list and add an entry to my life’s to-do list, due a week from then, telling me to send them e-mail or a message on Facebook. I’ve gone through with this four times. Once, as a result of this, a person was removed from the list, the only time that’s happened since I started writing the names down a couple of years ago. Every other time, I didn’t get a reply.
It might be the fact that it’s been raining in Boca for two days, solidly, or that I’m missing Oxford and Swarthmore’s first snows of the season, or that I read The Lovely Bones in its entirety this morning, which was just plain depressing — but this all makes me feel particularly lonely. One of these days, I’m going to just delete that note and move on.