I mean, is it really? Give me a break!
Ok, so I collect black pens. I think they look neat. So, every time I get a chance to pick up a black pen (advertising pens, store pens, celebrity pens, ‘really cool looking’ pens) I do.
So, now I have a box full of black pens. Which mostly don’t work. (but they are very attractive)
What do you collect?
I also collect tee shirts.
The tee shirt thing might be more relevant, since I collect tee shirts from places I’ve been. And you can show me one of my tee shirts and I can tell you where it came from, what was happening, why I was there and probably how much it cost.
A few years back I got this really great idea. I mentioned it to my wife and thought I had buy-in. I was going to have a model (hired through Craigslist) to wear each of the shirts, I’d take a picture of it, and then I’d get rid of the original shirt since it’s not really the shirt, it’s the symbolic nature of it.
You see the obvious flaw in this plan? When I actually FOUND a model, quite a cute female one … yea, I won’t even go further.
Needless to say, the project didn’t happen and the tee shirts are still in boxes in the garage. One nice thing, I’ve discovered vacuum bags and they don’t take up anywhere near as much space as they used to. But in bulk, tee shirts are still pretty heavy. I’ll likely do something boring in the future, like lay them out on an amorphous surface and take pictures.
Cars. Yes, I collect cars. Well, kind of.
I tend to buy cars that I feel sorry for and work on fixing them up so they can have a new home. Beyond this, I DO have some fairly permanent ones. Right now, they consist of a 1994 Corvette, a 2007 Saturn Sky, a 2003 S10 pickup, a 2008 Mini Cooper S, and finally a 1998 Chevy Venture Van. Of course, there’s also the 2009 HHR, but it’s my company car and doesn’t really count. Oh, almost forgot. The wife has a 2019 Mini Cooper Countryman.
Now, to the junk. I also collect computer stuff. For some reason, even though my JOB consists of working on computers probably 50 hours a week, I still find it therapeutic to work on computers during my off time. I think it’s the fact that it’s voluntary, and that mostly things go right. I mean, not that many things can go wrong with putting a new hard drive in a computer, formatting it and setting up the operating system and getting it ready to sell. In my job, everything that can go wrong does. Often. And usually at the worst possible time. Yes, this is the junk my kids will hate me for, having to go through and throw it all out.
I think I come by it naturally. My mom collects bells. “Fat bells, skinny bells, bells that look like rocks, tough bells, sissy bells, even bells with purple dots”.
Well, not, not exactly. But she does have over a thousand bells that originated from places all over the entire world. People would bring bells back to mom, it was traditional to bring back a bell to mom when you went anyplace interesting.
I have an idea that everyone collects something. What do you collect??