Obsessions

Here are some things I am "obsessed"* with:
Slate.com
Mini foods
Old books
West Wing
Stories about Rick Santorum's wife
Maggie Gyllenhaal (why is she so beautiful?)
Adam Scott (why is he so beautiful?)
Food blogs
How I Met Your Mother
HBO shows
And now...Paleo recipes


So turns out my body is even more Jew-y than I had originally thought.  Rather than just not being able to drink a hearty milkshake because of the milky part, I actually can't drink that milkshake for a whole long list of reasons.  Reasons that are also going to stop me from getting to eat normal bread.  Or cupcakes.  Or pie.  If you know me at all, you know this is a huge.  Problem.


But it turns out lots of other people have this same problem, or choose to give those things up (no, I don't understand it either) and they post recipes about it!  Pies I could actually eat!  It's amazing!  So obviously my new free time activity is watching episodes of How I Met Your Mother on Netflix while attempting to find every single pie recipe that has ever been written that I can eat.  Duh.


Here is the point of this post: how did people get obsessed with things before the internet?!  If someone in 1955 discovered that, in spite of their deep, abiding love of pies, they would not be able to eat them again, did they just have to find one random recipe and let it go?  Or (God forbid) give up pie?  But then after they found the one recipe...then what did they do?  Move on? Do other things? I don't understand.  I know we're supposed to be the generation of no attention span, but the idea of not being able to do one thing, or research one thing, for hours on end is really foreign to me.  I feel this in very small doses when I'm watching a show that's current.


Example: I'm a Mad Men fan.  I know some people wait until the whole thing is over because they can't stand the waiting, but I can't stand the waiting now.  I win for impatience.  But every time an episode ends, I cannot believe it.  I cannot believe that I am not going to be able to watch at least 4 more episodes immediately.


So in schools, maybe instead of complaining that kids have no attention span anymore (because I would argue that they do), we need to understand that the type of media they have attention span for has shifted, and adapt accordingly.  Can't textbooks be done Wikipedia-style?  History done in a way that shows the entertaining narrative, with better writing?  Science done with more experiments and less reading?  Novels read through a kind of digital treasure hunt rather than a lengthy readaloud?


All of this to say, I wish Matthew Weiner would teach my history class.  I would go every day.








*This is said as a psychology major with full knowledge that obsession is a real thing that is  very much over-used.  However, it is also said as an English major who tends to lean toward descriptive linguistics and thinks the word "obsession" now basically just means something you really, really, really like.  And also as a public policy major who loves caveats.  Ok, I feel better.