Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [67]
“Lynn and I have been having a little discussion,” Amber said. “And we’ve come to the conclusion that in light of your work and ambitions and the very length of your body, you are in need of a larger bedroom.”
“Or a bedroom at all,” Lynn volunteered.
“So … maybe—if it’s okay with Amy—you could come live with us!”
“And make us cappuccinos!”
“And T-shirts!”
“But there’s one condition.” Amber raised her finger and waited for Eli to focus his eyes on it. “Under no circumstances are you to fall in love with us.”
I excused myself. In the kitchen I opened the freezer door and stuck my face inside. The heat sloughed off my cheeks in waves.
Zoë’s manager from The Brewery was leaning against the counter, reading Zoë’s UrbanStyle article. She slapped the magazine against my hip playfully.
“It was good of you to let her write about this,” she said.
“Write about what?” I asked.
“Haven’t you read it?” she asked.
“No, we just got it today.Why?”
“Well, you might not be having much luck as an author, but I think you may have found work as a muse.”
No luck as an author. It surprised me how abrasive the woman could be.
“It’s good.” She handed me the magazine and began skirting her way around me to return to the party. “Something every woman should read.”
I flipped back to the first page of Zoë’s essay. In boldface the heading read: Making a List, Checking It Twice. Beneath ran a subtitle: Getting to the Bottom of the Modern Woman’s Obsession.
Under the two-page heading, a woman sat at a white desk in a white room. Thousands of identical yellow sticky notes plastered the walls, the chair, the nondescript desk—even the woman. She sat at a table with her legs primly pressed together, her back straight, and her eyes staring upward at the enormous pile of chores littered about her head. In her left hand she held a smartphone and in the right a red pen poised over the Franklin Day Planner lying open on the desk.
At the bottom of the page, the article began:
A few weeks ago, while scavenging for a working pen (an abnormally rare commodity in an apartment of aspiring authors), I found a rather telling scrap of paper beside my housemate’s computer. Or, I should say, several rather telling scraps of paper. In piles around her desk, hung from the bulletin board over her bed, lining her computer screen in sticky notes were to-do lists. Not one, but many.
These to-do lists were categorized in various ways, the chores organized by location, by day, or by priority. For example, there was one list of things to do while in the downtown area (drop off laundry, buy stamps, pick up library books) and another for things to do by 5:00. She had taken pains to carve out ten-minute slots for eating and even a twenty-minute slot for showering.
My housemate is a textbook addict of multitasking productivity: the belief that the worth of one’s life can be measured in the efficiency with which one completes the highest number of chores. But is this any real way to live? Are we killing ourselves with our need to be productive?
My friends and co-workers keep checklists. So did my mother—until the day she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Standing before my housemate’s extensive collage of chores, and thinking of these women I know who’ve struggled in one way or another with the same compulsion, I began to wonder if it’s possible that in spending our days in the systematic elimination of perceived obligations, we are actually missing out on living itself… .
“Do you have more ice?” Everett asked. He held two empty cups in his hands. “Rations low.”
“Up there.” I gestured toward the freezer absentmindedly, excusing myself through the crowd to my bedroom. I locked the door and turned to page 223, where the article went on to explain that checklists were symptomatic of a woman’s need to feel productive. It then delved into a brief lesson on history, tracking the evolution of the Franklin Day Planner to the present-day smartphone, detailing how digital calendars had only increased the dependence