Making a list And checking it twice a minute BY CAITLIN SHETTERLY

Spring, I feel it’s safe to say, makes everyone bi-polar. Maybe it’s that we’re finally thawing after almost six months of deep freeze. This is the season of jittery coked-up energy, the unearthing of issues gone dormant, and the desire to shed skins at an alarming rate. Even my cat rushes around bucking her backside like a bronco and trilling at the air coming through an open window with a glee I haven’t seen in months. It wears her out quickly. Then she yells at me that I need to feed her. I was thinking about this as I drove south down the highway to get my taxes done by a Republican (why in hell would anyone want a Democrat doing their taxes?) when I saw all the junk on the side of the highway newly exposed by the melted snow — the sloppy human detritus of a long winter and a laziness that borders on criminal. We throw everything from tires to garbage at the trees. Why them?

I try to get a handle on this roller coaster of jitters and glee and downs by making lists. I’m a major listmaker. Like, OCD about my lists. Everything in my life, at times, is reduced to a list. I have a calendar that I leave at my house that allows me to plan, but for the day-to-day I buy notebooks which have lists for each day. My lists have everything from "go to Hannaford" to what I need to do at Kinko’s to reminding myself to go to the post office to phone calls I need to make, appointments I need to go to, and things I need to bring to meetings.

The truth is that some of the stuff I put on those lists I’d most likely do without the list. I always go to the post office, for instance. This is sort of a regular. But there it appears day after day under the heading "mon" or "thur" on a piece of lined paper. I think I put it there because I like to cross it off, but even more it makes me feel somehow in control to have everything on the list.

I make other kinds of lists, too. I have a master shopping list, my pie-in-the-sky, for a time when I have about three days and unlimited funds to get everything from Hannaford, Wild Oats, the Green Grocer, farmers markets, and the Asian markets that would make my kitchen a culinary oasis. This sits in a bowl on my counter and is rarely consulted. I have a list for things I want to buy myself — like new jeans, Fendi sunglasses I’ll never be able to afford, a dress from BCBG, and the perfect pair of white sandals I’ve been trying to find for two years, just in time for them to be a fad this spring. I have a list of movies I want to see, music I want to buy, books I want to read, books I feel like a total idiot for never having read — like Moby Dick and Anna Karenina — and I have a list called "10 Things I’m Grateful For," which my mother says I should read aloud each night before bed.

I have a list of all the things Cowboy has of mine at his house that I want back. I do not have a list of what I have of his. I have a confidence-boosting list of things I should write about but am too lazy to get to. I have something called "long term list," which is a piece of paper that goes from my counter to my table to my study with things like "call editor at NPR and tell him I want to go to Azerbaijan." Somehow this never gets done. I have a list called "long range plan," which involves possibilities of graduate school as well as classes and programs around the globe (again, unlimited funds). I have a list called "incoming funds" and then below it "outgoing."

This one makes me sick.

I thought my lists were insane — something I should hide from people — until I bumped into a friend in the produce aisle at Hannaford who had lists he had made on his computer that were all on a clipboard. One said "Home Depot" another "Hannaford," another "Wild Oats" another "drug store." Each list had lines and boxes and places to write new things. When I asked about it (my own notebook out in my creaky cart — why is it I’m always the one who gets the embarrassing cart?) he told me it was his only way of staying on top of things. He seemed really jittery.

My guess is those lists are his only prayer against spring.

Just writing about my lists makes me nervous. Like I-might-jump-out-the-window-into-the-forsythia-with-trash-around-it edgy. I’m obsessing right now about all the lists and how so much of the stuff on those lists goes through endless cycles of being moved from day to day to day until I just cross things off in resignation. My desire for order seems so utterly unattainable and totally depressing and futile. Maybe my lists need to be something else, like something I could finish?

• Give diamond to brother

• Then go to Buenos Aires for six months and don’t talk to family

• Stop reading Alice Munro because she makes you want to kill yourself

• Eat once in a while

• Hug kittie

• Marry Rich

• Then go to Paris

• Stick head in sand until July

Caitlin Shetterly can be reached at bramhallsquare@yahoo.com