If Nobody Loves Me

Looking back on the past few weeks.

I realized that most of my posts as of late have been somewhat boring. OK, maybe mind-numbingly boring. That is why I'm just going to start typing and hope something amusing comes out. You have been warned...

Coin and stamp collecting have to be the lamest of all types of collections, yet for some reason if someone had a really nice coin collection I think I would really admire it. In fact, if it were a nice enough collection I might even be tempted to start a collection of my own. That reminds me of how kids in elementary and middle school act. Remember Giga Pets? A couple of kids had them and then (despite their inherent lameness) everyone else wanted them. Strange phenomenon really.
The other boys and myself all watched as more and more girls carried them around on their key chains and we grew more and more envious. Unsure of whether they were a "girl" thing we were forced to sit brooding in our pits of 3-bit jealousy. That is, until one of the "cool" guys finally granted us relief by stepping up and buying his own digital pal. Then we were finally clear to join the fad.
Of course those simple programs were harder to take care of than real living things. If you forgot to feed it for 30 minutes your squirming blob's fate was sealed. No amount of play or pizza could bring it back from the icy grip of death. It was a evil idea really, and I'm convinced that the people and Ban-Dai secretly enjoyed breaking children's hearts via their software.
Then there was that whole yo-yo fad at my school in seventh grade. To me no one looks more hopeless and unproductive than a hardcore yo-yo guy. If an intellectual were to write an essay on "Hopeless and Unproductive" for a respected national journal, you can bet your life there'd be a picture of a grown man with a yo-yo next to it. Yet once a couple of the populars started "walking the dog" down the halls at school and executing the oh so impressive "around the world" an unheard of 20 times, everyone inevitably found themselves drawn to purchase a yo-yo of their own. Not only that but we dreamed that we could practice hard and one day find ourselves competing in the world championships of yo-yo, next to that mythical Japanese kid that may or may not have actually existed. Once we shamed him with our awesome skill, we could pick up a couple of adoring females and live out the rest of our lives on money from our sponsors.
Strangely enough I've recently learned that the real world isn't too far from that. Now, in the Halo 2 field at least, there are sponsored professional video game players. It's like stock car racing only more intelligent and less respectable. John A. Nerd spends 7-10 hours a day "at work" improving his game, and why not? Last year one impressive (or depressing depending on your perspective) gamer earned a respectable $80,000 of income for his talent. And they all laughed at little Johnny when he said he wanted to play video games when he grew up!
Maybe one of the hardest things mankind will ever struggle with is to be separate from everyone else, though all of our instincts or natural inclinations lead us to want nothing more than assimilation. Love itself is perhaps most accurately viewed as our desire to have complete unity with another person. At least it is amusing to observe how these desires of ours manipulate our interests in the unimportant things, as in the cases above above, and how the ways of the world change to accommodate them.

Is anyone else sad because of their unnecessary amount of excitement over the prospect of vegetable oil as an alternative to conventional fuel in diesel engines? Or....umm..maybe that's just me.