ONE AT A TIME PLEASE

I'm what you might call a fixatater. I fixate. And the level of my fixatatedness has grown dramatically in the last few years, as I'm sure Aunt Chrissy would be only too happy to tell you if you took her out for a nice cool adult beverage.

Fixatatedness means that I am completely incapable of just viewing/reading/seeing/thinking something banal or simple without turning it into a "thing". Or, as Aunt Chrissy likes to call them "one of my obsessions".

We were riding in the car a few weeks ago and she said "Your obsessions just kill me." I, of course, took that to mean that she was bemused by all of my shenanigans and that if it weren't for the joy that was me, she would be a lonely and dour old spinster with a dog. (Oh wait. That's me.)

But what she REALLY meant was..."Your obsessions are causing me to lose sleep, spend money, elevate my blood pressure, and want to stab you repeatedly in the face with something sharp." I guess by "killing" she meant actual bodily demise and NOT comic enjoyment of the wonder that is me.

I'm not sure where it all went off the rails exactly, but I can tell you that fixatating is exhausting and seems to manifest itself (with me anyway) in several different areas. Let's take a walk down Crazy Lane, shall we?

1) The damn TeeVee.
I blame HBO and Showtime for this one. It all started innocently enough with The Sopranos many many moons ago. Once I saw my first episode, I was hooked and just had to watch every single moment of every single storyline of every single season over and over and over again. I became a "super fan" and could answer questions about character development and plot that even David Chase His Very Self didn't know. Once The Sopranos was over, I started with The West Wing. Then it was Sex and The City. Then it was anything by the documentary film maker Ken Burns. (What can I say? I had a little PBS in the midst of all of my smut and such.) I don't need revisit the Tudor fixatation. You got to read about THAT little period of my history in between the two days a month that I actually wrote about something other than dog pee and Johnathan Reese Myers.

Now it would seem that we're in a whole Nurse Jackie, The Borgias, and, as of 2am this morning, Game of Thrones mode. Yup. I'm a mess. Can't keep all of the story lines straight and am now waiting for Edie Falco to wave from the Pope Mobile as she conquers one of the Seven Kingdoms.

2) Stitching
I was on a roll there for a little while and was knocking out the finishes like nobody's business. Remember when I was doing that? Do you suppose we could call that "The Good Old Days In Which Our Heroine Had Half A Freeking Brain And Didn't Feel Compelled To Stitch Every Single Thing In Her Stash"? There are 14 projects all kitted up and ready to go in Ye Olde Stitchy Organizer thingie, but for the last 48 hours I've obsessed over these two:



The top piece is ready for some alphabets, and the bottom piece (which I am just LOVING, by the way) has a few more hours and we can call that block finished. (Oh, please excuse the sashing issues...I will need to go back for a little restoration once the block is completed). The fixatating here is that I want to stitch both of these projects AT THE SAME TIME, and no matter how hard I set my very little brain to it, I just cannot figure out how to do so.

3) The state of the union. I'm pretty sure that this happens to me every year, but I am feeling compelled to tear every single room of my house apart, purge the living daylights out of it, and then clean it to with an inch of its life. Fortunately, this mood passes very quickly, and I am able to climb back into the Happy Chair with the remote and the ort jar and all becomes well once again.

Fixatating is not for amateurs or the weak of heart, I tell ya. You have to be prepared to sit at the kitchen table at 4am, writing lists upon lists upon lists of everything you want to accomplish. You'll write and write and write, and your lists will soon organize themselves into categories like "Stuff that I had better do before the walls close in on me" and "Errands that I need to run or Stewey is going to run away from home". The good thing about being a fixatater with lists is that you can spend more time writing them and then re-writing them than you do on the actual stuff that you've written and then re-written on them, so although nothing gets done, you save a lot of energy and improve your penmanship all at the same time.

So that's all that's rattling around in my brain today. Throw in the fact that I also fixatate over this here blog, geopolitical affairs, thunderstorms, and learning how to make pie crust, and you've got yourself one very big episode of crazy for the next Oprah Winfrey Presents special. (9pm Eastern, 8pm Central).

Happy Monday! I hope that whatever you're fixatated on is exactly what you want it to be! Woo Hoo!