Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Weirdest List contest / deadline is November 30th

I generate lists constantly because they help keep me on track as shorthand for: longer lists, future things I want to write, and images and events and conversations I want to implant firmly into memory. I am constantly writing on small pieces of paper, receipts, unpaid parking tickets when I'm in the car. Usually, it's to capture some nuanced impression--with just a few written words--that's been made on me by a song or conversation on the radio. I imagine that drivers in the next lanes over think I'm a kook for scribbling behind the wheel, using the dashboard as desktop--but only when the traffic light's red.

On that note (no pun intended), I want to spread the word about a very cool contest created by Sasha Cagen, whose many "jobs" also reads like a laundry list: writer, editor, quirkyalone-movement- leader, and world's leading to-do-list-ologist. Sasha maintains a very quirky blog called the TO DO LIST BLOG, which evolved out of her zine about to do lists. Sasha's quite the darling of sub-cult community-making, with big-name contributors to the book (including Nick Hornby) and big-media (Anderson Cooper, for example) attention to her to-do-ology.

Okay, here's the info, as excerpted from one of Sasha's blogposts:

THE WEIRDEST LIST Contest

"To celebrate the book's release, I'm sponsoring a contest: The Weirdest List. Send in your weirdest to-do lists (real authentic lists that you wrote or found in the course of everyday life, please, nothing constructed for publication). I'm interpreting to-do list broadly for the contest, just as I do for the book. . . so this could mean life list, ideal mate list, possible goldfish names, etc. Weird can mean the entire list, the title, or a single odd item on it. Sometimes the most intriguing lists are entirely banal and mundane until the eye gets to that very cryptic item.

Here's how it works: Send a scanned jpeg of your list to todolistblog AT gmail.com by November 30.
Please write "WEIRDEST LIST CONTEST:" in the subject line before the title you give your list.
Readers of todolistblog.com will vote on the winners in the first week of December.

The top three vote-getters will win signed copies of To-Do List: From Buying Milk to Finding a Soul Mate, What Our Lists Reveal About Us (published by Fireside, November 6, 2007, 256 pages) and limited edition copies of "To-Do List," the print magazine where this project got started. . . in addition to bragging rights for having written or found the weirdest to-do lists ever."

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