Obsession: A compulsive, often unreasonable idea or emotion.
I love finding out what people are obsessed with, especially if it’s unreasonable. Not if it’s writing-my-name-in-lipstick-on-their-mirror unreasonable, but the curious, the unorthodox, the idiosyncratic are good. So tell me — what lights your fire, licks your lollipop, bakes your goose? Here are my current top five:
1. Pretty paper — All shapes, sizes, textures, colours.
2. Making cupcakes — I love getting all fifties in the kitchen and producing a piping-hot platter of these puppies.
3. Tweezers — it’s hard for me to describe the thrill that the excavation and extraction of an ingrown hair brings. It’s like a hard day’s work on an archaeological site.
4. Online stores — I like to see my family when I get home from work, but my favourite kind of greeting is the brown paper package with my name on it variety, and the knowledge that it came from somewhere I haven’t been yet.
5. Journalling — Recording both the frequent mundane and infrequent profound on paper helps to clear up some space upstairs. And I won’t deny that looking through pages filled with words — my words — is deeply satisfying in a narcissistic way.
Just for the record, I don’t normally combine these obsessions, so if you find some ingrown hairs in your cupcakes, they’re not mine.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Top 5: Current Obsessions
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7 comments:
Perhaps it would be healthy if some of these were only current. Alas, some are not.
1. The feeling of impressed handwriting under the fingers from my journal. There's something about the grammage of Moleskine paper and the vigour with which I make my mark that is thoroughly satisfying.
2. Journalling - yep, writing is fun, excavating and clarifying.
3. Feeling Fi's pregnant belly - hey, it's getting bigger innit?
4. Blog traffic counters - I've got them coming out the wah-hoo at the moment. They are way too satisfying...they feed an infatuation with numbers. I can stop anytime I want to. Yeah, sure.
5. Meterology - one drop of rain and I'm online to see the progress in the rainguage. (see #4)
Honorary #6:
Wearing sunglasses
Honorary #7:
Watering plants with grey water
I've been thinking a lot about top 5's recently, after seeing "High Fidelity" for the first time ever (I know, where have I been). My current definite top 5 obsessive loves are...
#1 I've bumped coffee off the No. 1 position to make way for typography. An oldie but a goodie. So obsessive am I that I am critiquing the song lyrics and teaching overheads at church.
#2 birds talking. At the moment I have a few butcher birds hanging out at my place, and I'm facinated by the conversations they have with magpies. The other day, I stood there as a bird talked to me for about 10 minutes and in that time he would have come out with about 30 distinctly different sounds. Marvelous.
#3 feather pillows. I've had these pillows for a while now, but the feeling as my head touches down each night hasn't gotten old yet. Last week I participated in a good old fashioned 'sleep over' and took my pillow along. It had the same effect. Kind of like a blanky.
#4 Cycling. Okay, I've gotten a bit slack lately, but still, every time I get on that bike and pull out of my lane-way, every weight in the world falls off and in an instant, I am free.
#5 le creuset cast iron cookware. I bought my 1st piece last saturday and could hardly wait to make a casserole. Not only is it a pleasure to cook with, but it looks good. Long live 'satin blue' I say... (even though it's been discontinued, hence my mega-bargain price, further enhancing my joy)
Oh yeah, how did I forget:
Honorary #8
Anal retentiveness with regard to the apostrophe
Le Crueset? Nice...Kitchen Warehouse I'm guessing.
you goddit! and at 1/3 the rrp!
My typographic obsession involves balancing ragged lines... oh and subtitles? when they cram a whole lotta talk onto one line, and leave a poor lonely widow on the next? Sheesh! have a heart, people!
Yep - sound typography reasonates with the heart of God: caring for the widows and the orphans.
1. thinking about motorcycles
2. thinking about guitars, fenders to be exact
3. checking internet blogs for some kind of linkage back to the world i once knew
4. spending time my wife
5. talking in spanish
1)Anything written by Clive James (witty like a ninja, learned, a Capital S Stylist). Ditto the crew at televisionwithoutpity.com (cereal-spitting funny, the most fluent speakers of Valley Girl English since Cher smudged her Alaia). (I am NOT explaining that reference. Google it.)
2)Counting things and writing them down.
3)Yellow Spirax notebooks. You can achieve anything with the correct size and style of Spirax: plan an event, drop a dress size, buy a house, get a promotion or a HD. I bet Al Gore used a Spirax to research his movie. I bet Don Rumsfeld wishes he’d used a Spirax to put together some sort of post-invasion arrangement. Hell, I wish he’d used a Spirax to do a little planning, dreaming, forecasting. They’re portable, classic, appropriate without being pretentious, not too precious to tear out a page to share but durable enough to last, oh, easily the six months this war was supposed to take. You can even get them with holes punched – just right for handing over to the President so he can file them away as evidence that he’s been fully briefed, even if he never looks at anything other than the amusing picture you’ve drawn in the margin – look! It’s John Howard as The Man Of Steel, only he’s actually a little boy dressed up in Superman pyjamas, with a pillow slip pinned on as his cape! Because he’s so tough, but not really! And it’s funny ‘cause it’s true! Ha ha ha ha ha! (I don’t know how to write laughter with a Texan accent…)
4)Interest rates and house prices. It’s a national obsession and I’m not ashamed to make a grab for the bandwagon as it grinds on by.
5)Warwick, Bijou, and the other assorted infants in my life. They’re just fascinating.
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