Collections/Collectables

HungryJoe

Carole's stepmom collects bear figures. I've known women to collect elephant figures, unicorn figures, cat figures, etc. It seems like they pick some animal when they're young and then start collecting. It's one of those inexplicable chick things. Thank goodness Carole doesn't do that.

I had a friend in law school who thought he could get a bally great engagement ring for his girlfriend by selling some of his baseball cards. This was in pre-eBay days, and he wasn't able to sell them for nearly as much as he expected. When I was doing divorces, I had a couple of clients who collected Coca-Cola stuff and Beanie Baby stuff and thought that it was valuable. It usually wasn't.

I knew a cop who collected expensive fountain pens.

I have some action figures, but I don't collect them. I just get ones I like, and I've never been inpired to get a whole set or anything. Also, I would never get one of those statues you see being sold in comic book shops for two or three hundred dollars. How can anyone afford something like that? I've never spent more than twenty dollars on an action figure.

Maybe about the closest I came to collecting was when I was on a model building kick. I had an Enterprise TOS model, and Enterprise movie model, a couple of Battlestar Galactica models, a bunch of Star Wars models (the Star Destroyer was easiest and best), and some fighter plane models.

Do you collect anything?

Edit: They're showing a marathon of The Life of Birds with David Attenborough on WETA, and they just showed an eagle capturing a monkey right out of a tree. Good. Stupid monkey.

HMTKSteve

One of my friends collects hubcaps. His wife has only recently got him to begin selling them on eBay. He also has a shit-ton of model car kits. All mint, never opened. She has not been able to convince him to sell those yet.

I collected games for a long time but I sold most of them late last year so I could buy my Wii. Most of the stuff was for RPGs and, since all these PDF-based game shops started popping up, I decided to sell while the market was still there. I got burned on Dragon magazine back issues when that darn CD-ROM collection came out!

I do not collect much anymore. For one thing I lack the space!

Our_Time_Is_Now

I really don't collect anything. I have enough junk laying around with out having a collection.

Sail

My dad collected cow stuff for years. When we lived in a condominium when I was little, my dad's bathroom was filled with all this cow stuff. When we moved into a house, my mom said he couldn't do that any more. So, we now have a ton of cow figures, plates, and a German advertisement for beef featuring a cow.

As a little tyke, I collected Hot Wheels. I still have all of them.

Apreche

I used to collect things when I was a kid. I collected snow globes, baseball cards, GamePro magazines, comic books, superhero cards, and more. Most of what I collected was cards of some sort. I inevitably got into Magic: The Gathering, but around the time I got into high school I realized it was Money: The Wasting. I haven't collected anything since.

When I say collecting I mean that you are buying similar things only for the sake of having them. It means you are getting enjoyment just out of having and buying these things. I mean, I buy more comic books now than I've ever bought before, but I don't collect them. I read them.

That being said, my brother sort of collects novelty M+M Dispensers, though I don't think he's bought any in awhile. My mom has been collecting these Longaberger Baskets for a few years. She even went to the Longaberger factory. I think my sister was in the Beanie baby fad at the start, but quickly dropped out around the same time as everyone else. It was fine because she was little at the time, and she actually played with them. I must admit, some of them are really cute.

Anyway, nowadays I look down on collecting for the sake of collecting. Accumulation of material goods doesn't really make me feel warm and fuzzy inside, just the opposite in fact. I buy things for their utility, and I attempt to dispose of items which are no longer useful to me. After con season I plan to do a lot of craigslisting and ebaying.

Our_Time_Is_Now

The last thing I collected was Yu-Gi-Oh cards. And Bayblades.

Bromley

I don't exactly collect things per say, but I have in the past bought items on impulse under the guise of storing them for years to resell them later. This habit was short lived, and really was only because walmart had the most awesome clearance aisle of Star Wars everything.

I'm not really big on collecting things, but I do keep things when I have them. For example, old video games. If I really liked the game, lets just say Age of Empires, I'd keep it, and the box. I have all the old boxes for most of the video games I had for PC when I was kid, sparing the crummy ones I returned. The same is true with PS2 games now. Although Black was a terrible shooter, I'll never get rid of it.

I think the most appropriate form of obsessive collecting is one I to this day hope to rekindle fervent interest in. LEGOs. You cannot not collect LEGOs. I have this terrible problem that whenever I buy twenty pounds of LEGOs from people, wash them, sort them, whatever, I realize, well shit, I need more LEGOs to make this. ad nauseum. However, recently it really hasn't been a hobby I've recently indulged in, as I don't have the time. When I'm an adult though, I think it will be nice to share with my kids all the toys I keep around from my childhood. Like my LEGOs, and of course my Matchbox, Playmobil, and most importantly the Micromachine toys. I think selling or throwing away toys like these is really a disservice to yourself.

I think I may be more of a rabid pack rat than I come to admit.

HungryJoe

Brom: Definitely save your toys. Your kids will thank you and you will be surprised how much happiness your toys will give you after you go through your inevitable "I'm too adult/cool for toys" phase.

Erwin

I do not collect, I always wanted to but I do not have neither the time nor the money. However, I do own collection of mangas such as Buddha and  Monster or the diggest of Runaways. You can say I have a nice amount of anime. Recently I have gotten the desired to read as much Osamu Tezuka material as there is out in the america market.

MrRoboto

I have about 60 Cook books, but I use them all the time, so I guess it's not really a collection, even if I buy them every time I have the money to do so

Jason

I used to collect pennants of all the fun places that I visited on family vacations. In the 80s and early 90s, you could find a state pennant, state park pennant, tourist trap pennant, or sports pennant just about everywhere you went for next to $0. Anyway, I gave that up around age 13.

These days I fall prey to collecting books and DVDs. When I realize that there is a movie or novel I will read/watch 100 times over the next two decades, I will find a very nice copy and add it to the shelves. I have more books than DVDs; in fact, I am completely out of shelf space. My mission will now be to subtly start eliminating my wife's pansy-ass books from our shelves when she's not paying attention to make room for mine.