April 25, 2007

My Obsessions Three (plus two)

My Obsessions Five just doesn’t quite ring the same.

Moom tagged me a few days ago. There’s an odd voyeuristic sort of fun to this particular meme because it’s fun reading about everyone’s obsessions, but am I really obsessed? Only time will tell. (And deprivation.)

There’s the obvious one: finances. I all too clearly enjoy the time I spend with my finances: nurturing, lecturing, egging them on. It’s probably borderline OCD because I get panicky if I’ve missed tending to them for more than a couple days. Almost nothing gets me as juiced up as talking, reading or discussing financials and ways to make, save and save’n’save money. And it’s so difficult not to go all evangelical whenever I see or hear my hapless audience going all squinty-eyed, even over the phone I can hear them do it, I swear, as I gabble on about how finances Can Be Fun.

Reading: Everything. Books, short stories, newspapers, magazines, blogs, comics, webcomics, commentary on webcomics, emails ….. everything. These days I have to move away from just reading quantity and selecting more quality but back in the day I always had my nose buried in a book no matter what I was doing. Even when we were reading a class-assigned book, I’d be reading my own book simultaneously. Yeah, that made the teacher really happy. I always wondered if I could be paid to read when I grew up. I should have specified that I wanted to be paid to read what I wanted to read, but …. well, I wasn’t so much a details kind of kid.

This practically deserves its own category but it’s still reading: I love comics. When I have disposable income, my drug of choice is primarily trade paperbacks, or graphic novels, now but that’s more of a practicality based on saving money on buying a single book collecting the monthly issues once every six months, and my patience factor of zero. I’m old, I can’t bear the anticipation of reading 15 pages of comic a month and then sit back to wait another month for my next installment. Then too, there’s the highly inefficient storage system I’ve got going on now, which is a short box under my bed and another one next to it, trades on the bookshelf. I admit it, I can’t wait to have my own house so that I have a real library and a wall dedicated to my comics and trades. San Diego Comic Con = Mecca.

Organizing/Planning: Office Birthday Monkey, Friends’ Birthday Alarm, Shindig Instigator. That’s me! And it’s automatically a surprise. It just is. And never happier am I than when obsessing over something, be it money, what I’m going to be when I grow up, when I’m going to grow up, or how I’m going to accomplish my goals that I previously obsessed over setting. You get the picture. I still haven’t reached conclusions for many of the those things but the act of obsessing is oddly filling.

Food: Food and I, we have an understanding. Except mushy/funny texture foods like ripe bananas, beans, mushrooms, etc. Approximately 60% of our office conversations revolve around food: what we’re craving, recipe exchanges, what’s for lunch, what’s for lunch tomorrow, desserts, food pictures, and the like.

Cleaning: By nature I’m a packrat, but only cyclically. The frugal part of me always stashes everything from ribbons on presents to half eaten energy bars because you never know when you might need that particular color of ribbon, and you certainly can’t throw food away! You can eat it later. But then, I’ve assisted in many a home-moving expedition and the idea of putting a bunch of stuff in a box, hauling said crap to another location, and having unpack that box eighteen months later is utterly revolting. If I don’t need it now, tomorrow, next week or next season, I don’t need it. Junk gets rounded up and donated, sold or chucked on a semi-regular basis. This brings enormous satisfaction.

And: Wanda, Tired of Being Broke, Golbguru, I tag you!