I am a quasi-anti-social, non-hobbyist, non-active type person. Left to myself--which happens regularly--I do nothing. Doing nothing is bliss. I don't do nothing in a mindful, meditative way, either. I just wander around the house in my bathrobe, drinking coffee and staring out the window. I probably look like an advertisement for antidepressants, except that I am content.
Am I a big loser because of this trait? Maybe so. Don't list me under the Movers & Shakers that you know. Am I boring? I rarely get bored, but then, nobody can get up into my head like I can, so yes, being around me is dull as sticks.
My brain is not necessarily a rich and exciting landscape. I do get one illuminating thought after another sometimes and think, "Oooo, I need to write this down, I am brilliant!", and then I write them down and find that they are the usual commonplace banalities only dressed up all sparkly when they are dancing in my head and not coming out of somebody else's mouth. Yep--my mind is mostly a continuous loop of hackneyed big-budget movies that think they are deep (much like American Beauty).
With all this mental activity going on, and so little to engage me in the real world, I guess that would make me prone to picking up obsessions. Fortunately my "down-time" comes in small increments, and my day-to-day life is busy enough to keep me out of serious trouble. I do get little obsessions, though. I don't know where they come from or why, but here are the two most recent:
1) Horse racing. The other day was my birthday (yeah, yeah, another one, whatever) and to treat myself I watched Secretariat. It's by Disney, so that gives you an idea of how slick and watered-down the movie is, and my kids said, "Ew, horse racing," and didn't want to watch it, so they had dinner out with their father and I watched it by myself. (If that underscores some sort of disarray of my priorities so be it--it was MY birthday, dammit.) It was actually a pretty good movie--Diane Lane and John Malkovich made the overt Disney emotional manipulation almost enjoyable--but it set off my latent horse racing obsession. I had to watch all the real Secretariat races on YouTube, and would have started in on Sea Biscuit and Seattle Slew if it wasn't that the kids were home and it was getting late. I don't know what it is. The only trip I want to take is to Saratoga. It's not a gambling thing, either, because I'm one of those people who is karmically destined to work my ass off for a living and I know it. (I'm trying to adjust that, though.)
2) Gerard Butler as the Phantom of the Opera. Okay, what the hell is up with that? I can't watch any of his other movies--300? The Ugly Truth? Oh, please. But pair him up with Andrew Lloyd Webber! Who knew the guy could sing? I need to stay away from Andrew Lloyd Webber scores--I had a major Jesus Christ Superstar obsession fifteen years ago around Eastertime, which is probably as close to a conversion to Christianity that I'll ever get (and I mean that seriously, I finally "GOT" the whole dying-on-the-cross thing, but that's a story for another day). When Gerry flaps his black cape around in a few of the scenes, I can remind myself that it's just a silly movie, but then at the end of "The Point of No Return" when he sings, "anywhere you go let me go too..." with such despair and longing, I am SO sunk. In the depths of this obsession, I found that he has had his New York City apartment featured in Architectural Digest. I tried to figure out whether or not this showed depth of character, then brought myself up short--he's an ACTOR, for crying out loud, WHO CARES!! An actor with an oddly shaped mouth! What the hell!
A few winters ago, I spent every night watching episodes of Sex and the City and eating buffalo chicken with blue cheese dressing, but that was more of a self-soothing experience than an obsession. With obsessions, my head comes off of my body and I float around in the stratosphere in a little bubble. It is unpleasant to come back down to Earth. What is it that I see way up there, precisely?
No harm done. I won't be watching The Bounty Hunter, either.
Ahhhh, Gerry:
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