The other morning in the bookstore, on my way to get my daily tall non-fat sugar-free vanilla Penn girl latte, I was sidetracked by one of those category tables. You know the ones - they try to assemble all the books from one subject (something along the lines of dieting, sex or studying) onto one table. If you're like me, such displays suck you in shamelessly until you realize that you've been reading bullet points about the best drinks for every occasion for entirely too long. And that you're now 20 minutes late for Spanish.
The table that snagged me on this particular morning was not boasting the usual colorful display of holiday-themed books. They weren't your standard Lonely Planet guides or collection of sex positions. Instead, they were of the relatively new subset of books that I've termed the "List Books" (you heard it here first). Instead of the normal narratives and pictures, these books list the superlatives of every subject known to man, thus furthering my Penn-induced anxiety that I am never doing enough and am under-accomplished and inexperienced. Here you will find the 1,001 Great Books to Read Before You Die, the 1001 Greatest Movies, and the 500 Best Albums of All Time, as well as the more obscure, but no less stressful 1001 Questions to Ask Before You Get Married, and the 1001 Most Breathtaking Gardens. For some reason, someone seems to have decided to kindly compile general consensus about, well, pretty much everything. For me, the combination of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, National Geographic's 1000 Best Adventures, and 101 Best Things to do in Europe got me thinking: what happens to Carpe Diem when life's experiences become check off points on someone else's arbitrary list?
The clichéd idea of Carpe Diem is that instead of continually living in the future or in the past, in personal accomplishment or in a trust fund, it might suit your soul to celebrate, enjoy, relax and indulge in the current moment. Unfortunately, we seem to have managed to take this thought and mangle it into an aggressive list of things you need to complete in order to make your time here seem worthwhile. Living it up and doing obscure shit is so hot right now. The idea being, I suppose, to have enough noted absurd experiences so that when you meet your maker, you can roll into heaven and throw G-Dawg a high five with a hangover from hell, after having drunkenly danced on a table with the Devil and some biddies, all after having completed mission work in Botswana.
The Best of Penn might be the "List Book" for the smaller, yet equally overwhelming, Penn bubble. It is another list of things to be done before your time is up. Much like its larger-scale counterparts, it can serve as a useful reminder and suggestion of how to best enhance your precious little time here. But much like those life lists, it can potentially give you the insidious idea that you have not truly experienced Penn until you've made out in the library stacks or finagled your way into Smoke's with a fake ID.
What's missing from all these lists is the other, but arguably more important side. There is no boxed to be checked or line to be crossed off in the experience and self-discovery of the unknown. Ultimately, you and your personal experience do not really consist of what you've done or who you've slept with or where you've eaten or how much money you have or where you party or what you drink. You are made up of so much more. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't make out in the stacks, or that you shouldn't go to Copa on Wednesdays or enjoy your zen time at the ecological lake; on the contrary, give it a go if you feel like it. Just don't add these to your obligatory must-have list, right in between a BlackBerry and those Tory Burch flats. Experiences are not serialized accessories to be collected and boasted. So craft your own "Best of" guide, written in the spur of the moment and in the spirit of serendipity. Just feel free to use ours as inspiration.
