Prone to Excess?

When I was a kid I loved Barbie. I loved Barbie so much, in fact, that when my mom decided to count my Barbies when I was four years old, I had over 200 of them. You read that right- 200. Do you know anyone else who can claim that? Ya, me neither...
Once on a trip to the beach, I decided I needed a hermit crab as a pet, so I got one. Then I got another one, and another one, and another 2 and then a big aquarium and some extra shells and some toys and then a few more pets. At the peak of my hermit crab addiction I think I had 11.
11 hermit crabs are smelly...
When I turned 16 I decided to collect Cabbage Patch Kids (if you dont know this, we prolly arent close enough for you to be reading my blog-hehe). By the time I left for college (when I was 18), my collection had grown to 1000 dolls. I KNOW you dont know anybody else who can claim that...
There were also times of baseball cards, stamps, rocks (collection of champions), and every type of doll you can imagine (well maybe not EVERY type, but you get the idea).
I wrote all this to say that even as a child, I was clearly prone to excess. But as I get older and more mature (stop laughing), I'm beginning to wonder if it was actually an obsession with having lots of things or if it was something else...
I was not a great student. Actually it would be more appropriate to say that i COULD have been a great student and sometimes was. But from as early as 5th grade, I was either a top student in the class or getting removed from class and sent to the principals office with a pink sheet. There was no in between with me- if I liked the class (and at that point it was probably more related to liking the teacher) I would excel, if not I could cause some drama.
The trend continued and probably worsened in high school and by college, I either went to class or I didn't- mostly I didn't. I don't mean that I occasionally skipped my classes, I mean that on multiple occasions I showed up for the first day of class and then didn't return until the final exam- I even skipped my final exams twice.
In the midst of not going to class, I started getting pierced. Most people might pierce their ears and maybe an occasional nose, but i got 14 piercings in 3 years or so. Then came the tattoos. I would argue that I have handled getting inked with plenty of self-control, but I know that my mother feels differently. And to be honest, the self-control comes mostly from a lack of money and not from actually trying not to cover my body in art :)
So this is where I am now. I am looking back at a childhood that seems very all or none and realizing that this tendency has bled onto my relationships. There are only two options with me- we can be very close friends or we can be acquaintances. I will care about you so much that if you are struggling I make myself physically sick with worry or I will barely notice your existence- there is no in between.
And apparently this is a problem. I am slowly coming to accept the fact that some people actually WANT to just be friends. They aren't looking for a BFF and aren't interested in adding another acquaintance- just a friend- and i have NO IDEA how to play that game!
Nor do I know how to only have one doll, one pet, or one pistachio...

Things I Loved Today

~ eating a Tony's cheese pizza with fake sausage- I ate the WHOLE thing yo!
~ snuggling under my covers with nothing to do and nowhere to go and watching it storm
~ seeing the Diamond Heels freak out on Chad Flack when he hit a 2 run homer to take the lead in the 8th- i teared up a bit
~ having a stranger pay my way into the skating rink and telling me "maybe you can pay back the favor to somebody else sometime"
~ skating for hours with eric and catching him watching me and smiling
~ a phone call with an old friend
~ scrapbooking!
~ drinking pineapple juice right out of the bottle
~ having patrick sleeping by my head as i type this
~ watching the Diamond Heels win the game as i type this :)
Happy Saturday!