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Jun 13, 2022Liked by Jesse Meadows

Yesssss I love this post!! I am a crazy bird lady. Trying to make a career out of it, which has somehow brought me to grad school in Iceland to study Long-Eared Owls. Did you know owl eye balls aren’t actually balls at all? They’re tube shaped basically like binoculars! Also their flight feathers have serrations that break up the air as they fly making them virtually silent in flight. So incredible. Love them.

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Jun 13, 2022Liked by Jesse Meadows

I spent days making a carefully curated playlist of Taylor swift songs that perfectly fit every major moment in the relationship of TK and Carlos from the show 911 alone Star which I’m currently also obsessed with. I’ve been dying to explain how Cornelia Street and champagne problems are a pair of songs, they have the same underlying chord progression and beat and (insert other music words I don’t know), they’re a question and an answer respectively, and they perfectly fit the moment at the beginning of season 3 when they break up. I lie awake at night thinking about how perfectly each one of the 26 songs on my playlist encapsulate the different stages of their relationship as they progress over three seasons of the show, how the lyrics perfectly correspond to their feelings and personalities, and how Carlos’s favorite Taylor Swift song is definitely Love Story because he’s a romantic at heart but also has felt for most of his life that if he ever found romantic love it would have to be a secret he kept from his family. If I didn’t have to finish drafting my masters thesis in the next six days I could write a sixty page essay on that instead. I spend hours ruminating on fictional scenarios in which I go to a fan convention and get to talk to other people about all of my ideas. Anyway I desperately needed to tell someone that so thanks for the permission and the great advice :)

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Jun 13, 2022·edited Jun 13, 2022Liked by Jesse Meadows

Thanks for the great advice! I love looking at plants but don't have the patience to grow them, so I'm on a mission to visit all the botanical gardens I can! They actually ARE like libraries for plants and I love them! All the exclamation marks because YAY obsession!!!

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I was trying to comment a bit sooner, but I couldn’t log in to my substack account to comment. So here I am a few days later, livin’ the sluggish life, and loving it!! Thank you so much for your writing!

The passion I have in my life is dog behavior and body language with some FF, LIMA, and positive reinforcement clicker training thrown in for good measure! The more we learn to communicate with our dogs in their language the greater our bond with them becomes. It’s the only area of my life I’m truly not a natural pessimist. It’s such an odd and fulfilling feeling. lol

I love meeting dogs and even they are dog that doesn’t want attention, I still love trying to figure out that’s what they’re trying to communicate (from a comfortable for them distance of course).

I know that you can get a PhD, but who needs it when there’s a dog over there!!

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that theory of mind essay u so casually linked has absolutely detonated my gourd

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My obsessions are very much almost always ~practical projects~ except I take them way WAY waaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyy past a """reasonable""" point. They typically have some sort of organizing/categorizing/collecting element to them as well. And exceptionally time-consuming and no one else can really see my end-goal in the way I can.

My biggest thing to date is my collage material library. I started making paper collages a few years ago super casually -- really as a way to relax and have fun and not take myself too seriously. And then I started picking up new materials here and there -- thrift stores, junk mail catalogs, and actually mostly on the street for free (which is now the only way I allow myself to bring home new stuff). It slowly evolved from lightly sorting the materials to an absolutely absurd operation. All books & magazines are completely disassembled immediately, with each page separated. Each sheet is combed over and kept as is (with a non-scraggly edge, trimming if necessary), or cut up for individual images/objects. The sheets that remain full are pretty much all full-size images (and only the ones I deem worthy). For each cut-out clipping, I trim around it tight and neatly, with just a thin border and I will cut it perfectly when I actually use it. I also have scraps (cleanly cut out) of just random background-y stuff or colors and whatnot that I salvage from unused parts.

After cutting everything up, I sort it. I have several sizes of little plastic cellophane flat sleeves (like page-protectors you would use in a binder but these are simpler and actually sold as cake-pop bags lol). Everything gets very very very very sorted. Like I have a sleeve for bagel sandwiches and a sleeve for stacks of bagels (I got a lot of Zabar's catalogs one year). A sleeve for empty cups and one for cups with liquid. A sleeve for old cars, one for new cars, another for toy cars. A sleeve just for blimps. A sleeve just for hats. Another just for saddles. SO many bugs and birds. An entire tray of just hands. It's.... A LOT.

I lost count a long time ago but I must have gone through a couple of hundred books at this point? And at least double that in magazines. I don't have a great way to estimate my clippings but it's definitely in the tens-of-thousands. I'm just not sure if that is closer to 15k or 90k hah.

I'm honestly not even done. I have to take a break from working on it for months at a time because I have to dedicate life energy to like very normal survival things or temporary projects/events. It looks like absolute insanity to so many people.

My partner however, literally does not bat an eyelash when she walks into a room and I'm carefully organizing little tiny things, clippings or otherwise -- I have all of our screws organized into little tiny ziplocs (or as I call them, drug baggies), because we have a lot of types of screws and many of them, only a few of a type. One day I got frustrated trying to find if a screw even had another that matched and I spent a couple weeks obsessively sorting our hardware.

Last year I spent all my free time for a couple months working on a perfectly detailed virtual model of our apartment. I'm an architect and we had just moved into an apartment we bought and we will need to do some renovations at some point. So, as expected, we surveyed and modeled it and began sketching designs. And for the visualization model, I started populating it with our furniture and accurate appliances and whatnot. At some point that turned into me measuring every little tiny thing in our apartment (doorknobs, hinges, vases, the glassware that's on open shelves, etc.) and modeling it. Haven't finished the reno designs yet. But. All of our stuff is perfectly modeled? Like I said. Wayyyyyyy past a point that other people would take it. But I wouldn't have it any other way.

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I am also currently obsessed with plants so I feel this. But also, you ABSOLUTELY could get a PhD in NASCAR or Doctor Who, and I guarantee there are people who have done so! Literally anything you want, you can get a PhD in, guaranteed.

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My wallet is the only thing holding my obsessions back :'(

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I spent two hours yesterday feeling out about terrestrial snails with some snail biologists (I am not one but tangentially work related interest). It was SO MUCH FUN. I can see my coworkers’ eyes glaze over when I start talking about snails but when I was hanging out with those biologists, it was like no judgment, no pressure, and such a relief to indulge in an interest without feeling like a fucking weirdo.

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been watching ds9 as my show i use to distract myself into doing things. i love the pacing, i love the everything. just watched a really good Odo ep and i have Thoughts!

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Im currently obsessed with trauma theory, bicycle parts and rgb lighting 🥰🥰

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Oh god I relate to this so so much. I just want to tell people thing! About how much I love it! LET ME BE ENTHUSIASTIC YOU FOOLS

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