li.st

Dear friends,

The best thing happened this week. THE BEST THING. You may need a little context before you can fully understand my success although, if I’m honest with myself, I can’t hope for too much understanding, as this success also involves the more fringy facets of my personality.

Anyway.

Please, if you do not have the li.st app on your phones right now, download it. Not only will the app provide context for my story, but it will also make your life ten and a half times better.

{It is available for Apple and now Android. There are no excuses.}

I discovered the li.st app last fall through BJ Novak’s Instagram post promoting his new social media app that he co-founded with his brother Lev Novak.

{BJ Novak plays Ryan the temp on “The Office,” has a fascinating and lovable relationship with Mindy Kaling, and inexplicably hates the theater (read about that here).}

It was love at first scroll.

The concept of the app is simple: Instead of posting a picture of your vacation or a 140-character thought, you post a list. Any kind of list. You may be wondering what is so compelling about something so mundane as a list (my brothers had a hard time understanding the concept); to that I would say, first, HOLD YOUR TONGUE, and second, you’d be surprised.

I’ve always been a list-maker. Whether it’s learned or hereditary, I’m sure I got it from my dad and my dad’s dad. They’ve both carried to-do lists in their shirt front pockets as long as I can remember. Not only this, but I’ve loved lists since David Letterman’s Top Ten List. I might just list the reasons I love lists.

When I discovered this app, it was like I discovered a community of my kind.

I’ve become *a little* obsessed with some of the regular li.sters. I’ve got a few people whose lists I look for anxiously. I’ve developed imaginary friendships. I never thought I would be that person, but then, I guess it doesn’t surprise me.

Dennis Flynn

There are some really smart writers involved in the li.st community. It seems the list form drives creativity in new ways. There’s one guy, Dennis Flynn, who I especially love. He writes little short stories in the framework of the “thoughts of” someone in a very specific situation.

Now for the good part of my story.

Among all the lists on the li.st app are my eight little published lists. Most have been seen by only a few friends, but this week, I saw that my list “Real-World Adult Situations I Turned into Childhood Imagination Games” was featured on the main li.st app page! Strangers were seeing my list. As silly as it was, they were reading what I’d written.

I got a surge of inexplicable power. I felt like I could control the whole internet that night. I wrote a list essentially to express my love to Dennis Flynn and tagged him in it, with the vigor of one of my late-night Facebook messages to an old boyfriend. I published it. The next morning I felt the familiar doubt, verging on the edge of regret. All day I watched to see if @dfly said anything. Finally…he commented. I cheered in triumph and felt connected to the big, wide universe.

Okay, it’s a very small triumph. But this week, it seemed big.

And really, the main point of this whole thing is to tell you that you should try the li.st app.

I guess I could have just made a list of reasons why you should try it. Maybe I will, check the app.

Your listing friend,