There’s been a lot of talk lately in my circle of people I hang out with about bucket lists. Naturally, when someone starts talking about such a thing you start thinking about your own bucket list, which I did, but despite thinking hard enough about it to solidify a few things that rank at the top of such a list, I still didn’t physically write anything down.

Soon after all this talk of things I want to do before I die, (which includes reading all of Sherman Alexie’s work), I read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. The book is touching, wonderful, sad and hilarious…it is excellent. I came away from it with a lot of wonderful things about life, the pain that comes with life, friendship, love, loss and grief. My God, there is so much grief in this book, it’s hard to believe it is geared toward young adults, but I suppose grief doesn’t discriminate, hence, Alexie writing it for those who are affected by grief the most, the young.

Anyway, when the young protagonist in this book is up to his eyeballs in grief, he has a moment, an epiphany, during which he realizes that despite all the grief he’s been dealt, there is a lot of happiness in his life still, so he writes it all down. He makes lists of all the things that make him happy—favorite people, favorite books, favorite foods, things that make him happy. And the lists do help him through the impossibly difficult time he’s going through. 

Well, although I’m not going through any grief at the moment *knock on wood*, I am going through a renaissance of sorts, through which I hope to become a more positive individual, and sometimes a girl needs a visual aid to help her along. I’ll be working on this list of lists, among others:

- a bucket list

- a list of my favorite things

- a list of my favorite foods

- a list of my favorite books

- a list of my favorite movies

- a list of my favorite activities

- a list of my favorite places