One for Sorrow

One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret never to be told.
Eight for a wish,
Nine for a kiss,
Ten a surprise you should be careful not to miss,
Eleven for health,
Twelve for wealth,
Thirteen beware it’s the devil himself.

I am a magpie.

When I started woodworking I ended up buying a bunch of tools.

I found out I have ADHD almost a year ago, in an effort to understand it better I collected a list of 30-40 books to read about it. I whittled it down to what seemed the best for what I was actually dealing with but the list is there, to be borrowed or found online. I’ve gone through 2% of one book and it’s been helpful, but that works about to 2% of 2% of the list which in simple terms, is real small.

For the last year I had access to essays through a membership I paid for. The way the author thinks and expresses himself are at a higher caliber than I can hope to replicate. Knowing that my membership was going to lapse, I used a web clipper to create personal copies of all his essays to date. That probably wasn’t his intention in making everything available to members, but I wanted to collect them. I’m not sure where this instinct came from. But I wanted ALL the essays.

One of my first memories of the internet (during the age of dialup and windows pinball) was reading the entire paginated catalog of jokes.com. I wanted to have read ALL the jokes.

I have more than a few Spotify playlists that are filled with just one artist and ALL of their songs.

There’s an artist that used to produce under the name White Morning, I originally found his music on the defunct NoiseTrade, but lost the tracks I had downloaded and he stopped producing music. It took me years to gather ALL his work again.

And now as I am getting back into drawing and writing I gather lists of lists of resources to read. All “to write an essay” that spans 500 years and involves Puritans, slavery, the American Civil war, and the intellectual divorce of conservatism from intellectualism and the physics of radio and television. I have enough books to last months if I did nothing but read them.

And I have books to read about how to speak to God and to trust that God is actually listening and of course how to read the Bible. And at work I have access to dozens of books about programming and power query, in case I decide that I want to pick up python properly or R or any number of other languages that I’ve had a fancy for.

But why?

It’s probably a security thing. If I don’t have access to it then I’ll have to pay money or have to find it again. Maybe it’s a pseudo productivity thing as well. I like batching work and gathering resources is different than processing them. If I have everything I need before I start then I can just focus and get into the zone.

My guess is that I don’t really know why I’m a magpie, but why are you?