Obsessions

My oldest son loves video games. He loves them so much that he turned his sixth-grade country project from “Japan” to “The History of Video Games in Japan.” When he was in fourth- grade I swept his room for his DS and Wii games before he went to bed, but often would still find him in the morning with the handheld game clutched to his chest (yes, I needed to be more creative about hiding places). About nine years ago I was studying vocabulary words with him. “What’s an estate?” I asked. My son looked at me blankly. I gave an example to help him out, “Luigi’s Mansion” is an estate– a big house with lots of land.” Pretty soon we were relating every vocabulary word on the list to some aspect of Super Mario Bros. and within ten minutes my previously reluctant kid had the words memorized and could use them all in sentences.

I see the same tendencies in myself– I am serious when it comes to obsessions. For a long time I read everything I could about pregnancy, childbirth, and child development. When I stopped having babies, I flung myself into scrap booking and then blogging (charting my page views obsessively) and learning about running, reading dozens of books about how to improve my times. I’d go to bed thinking about running, wake up thinking about running, and think about running when I was running.

These days, I still run, but I’ll do just about anything not to think about it when I’m doing it. My first preference is to run with friends, but if I can’t drag anyone else out, I listen to music.

My same oldest son, Morgen, started working last Friday at a little Mexican restaurant down the street. He went in to apply on Tuesday, was called back for an interview on Thursday, and hired for Friday! He works Friday and Saturday nights now. Since he has a job - he also wanted to buy his first car. A silver Honda Accord that he found online, after much searching and researching - for a mere $4,000. He didn't have enough money saved up from tutoring and babysitting for the down payment, so he decided to take all of the before mentioned and much loved video games down to the local video game store to sell them. He filled up my laundry basket and two large bags full of games and accessories and I took him down there. The video gamer guy had never seen that extensive of a collection. An hour later and he had successfully traded in over two hundred video games. And was now ready to put his down payment on his car. His obsession with video games has not ended, just his collection of them has.