Soothing Activities
I can understand why so many people enjoy needle work on things like counted cross stitch or knitting. It takes up time. It requires some concentration, but not enough to give you a headache. When you're done, you have something tangible to look at. I get my groove on not by stitching but by certain kinds of organizing. I'm sure Wonder Woman wishes my organizing preference were linen closets and so forth. It's not. This is not a post on making productivity your hobby.
When I was growing up, I collected comic books and baseball cards. When it came to comics, I enjoyed three categories: Archie, Richie Rich and anything made by DC: Superman, Batman, The Flash, Green Lantern etc. My younger brother and I decided to have a joint collection. We'd spread comics on the floor and sort them by title and then by the individual number the publisher assigned to them. Some stacks were tall. Action Comics was where Superman got his start. It had been continuously in print since the 30s. Detective Comics, Batman's home, was the same way. Other stacks were much shorter, as superheroes would come and go. By the time we were in junior high school, we'd accumulated over 700 comic books, both from newsstands and many, many trips to used book stores. There weren't any comic shops in the places we lived. For me, though, all of that work came to a crashing halt in 1979 when my desire to escape my mother's wrath for misbehavior gave my brother leverage over me. He demanded my half of the comic collection in exchange for not narcing me out for smoking cigarettes. I gave in. He still has those comic books, 45 years later.
I bought baseball cards until adulthood was well established. I had a giant tray that would hold hundreds of cards at the time, and I loved to put on an Atlanta Braves game and buy a box of cards to open and sort while watching. Rather than numerical order, I liked to sort my baseball cards into teams, alphabetized by players' last names. There was mass over production of cards in the late eighties and early nineties, with several companies competing with Topps, the OG card manufacturer. I bought cards by Upper Deck, Fleer, Donruss and more along with a monthly magazine that gave values to each card. Most of them were worthless, then, and now. I gave up on baseball when it turned out that the success of players I admired, like Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Roger Clemens, was due as much to their ingestion of performance enhancing drugs as it was to their talent. I sold a collection of some 20K cards for $100 and never looked back.
When Napster came along and allowed computer nerds with broadband connections to download music as fast as we could type in bands to search for, I went nuts. I assembled the Rolling Stone Magazine collection of the top 500 rock albums of all time. Very few of the songs were tagged correctly, so I used various software titles and the website, Allmusic.com to verify track names and track numbers and the genre and all the miscellaneous information like release dates on all the music I downloaded. I spent many hours sitting at a desktop Mac editing MP3 tags while listening to music. I loved it, and today I am grateful to my past self for having done such an outstanding job.
These days, I am fanatical about keeping two types of data organized: my thousands of Obsidian notes and my photographs. Both of these lend themselves to being sorted in various ways digitally. I use both tags and folders because why not? During the upcoming holiday break, i will spend many hours happily looking at photos and reading notes and clipped articles and deciding where to file them. It sparks joy. It soothes me. Not only that, but it's what I like to do more than just about anything else.
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