Picking and Choosing: Four Things

Whittling down the longlist to a shortlist is a little difficult to document on this blog. I might take a photograph of the physical copy of the longlist and show you its multi-coloured amendments. A magenta star means it's something that I really, really want to do. An orange star means worthy and boring, but possibly still a candidate for the list because otherwise it won't get done. A blue crossing-out means that it's something that is important and should be done, but may not get done this time round, or is perhaps something that is not appropriate to talk about in any detail on the internet. A green crossing-out means that it's a really bad idea and I shouldn't do it ever. Yellow highlighter means that I would probably end up doing it whether or not it went on the list, or indeed whether or not I did the list at all. Red annotations are amended goals - conflating goals, replacing xs with actual numbers in 'do y thing x times'. A maroon crossing-out means that I can't really be bothered with that one. And so on.

Here's a sample:

Magenta star - 'Take a flight in a hot air balloon'. Yes, I know freddiefraggles said ephrael said that it can be rather dull. But I've loved hot air balloons ever since I was tiny and witnessed a whole field of them taking off. I had a scrapbook full of pictures, and everything. I really, really want to do it. So it gets a magenta star, and it's staying on the list.

Green crossing-out - 'Argue with an evangelist'. I wrote this down when I was annoyed, having been given a leaflet by a leafletting man, to find that it was all creationist bunkum, which I'd have handed straight back had I read it on the spot. I don't want to deliberately set out to argue with someone, though, and I don't want anything so negative on my list.

Yellow highlighter - 'Finish the queerlit50 challenge'. I've already read 28 books for this; at the current rate I'd probably only have about ten to go by the time I started working on 101 in 1001.

Blue crossing-out - 'Walk the Camino del Norte'. Yes, I do want to do this. Yes, walking the Camino Francès was probably the greatest achievement of my life to date. Yes, this is still a very important goal. Realistically, though, I'm not going to have two straight months to do it in, the way I did in 2007. And, equally important in a completely different way, I don't want to do it without my best friend, who came with me last time. If it would be difficult for me to manage it, it would be impossible for her. I'm not going to lose sight of this goal, but I'm happy for it to wait.