People are downright weird.
We do the strangest things. One of the things we do is create work for ourselves that has absolutely no value to anyone, apart from the satisfaction of having done it. We call these things “Hobbies.”
A lot of hobbies involve collecting things or racking up numbers. Some people even construct entire buildings to house these collections of useless trivia. Or they contact the Guinness people and try to beat other people’s records doing stuff that wouldn’t even occur to a normal person.
What’s wrong with these oddballs? Jeez! Some people have way too much time on their hands.
People spend time learning udderly useless skills, like Mooing. They learn to moo like a cow. They even have competitions.
Or dirt polishing, which is a Japanese hobby (where else?).
For this particular hobby, you take a ball of mud and form it into a ball. Keep working it and smoothing it until all the moisture has evaporated, and it’s polished like a billiard ball. Some particularly innovative practitioners have taken it a step further and do this with dung. Personally, I don’t plan to take up turd-polishing any time soon.
Extreme ironing: Ironing clothes anywhere and everywhere — in a canoe, underwater (really? What’s the point?) in the bathtub, in a cave. Like I said. Weird.
But there’s one I’d love to try: Duck herding.
It’s a competitive sport, especially in the U.K., naturally. The Brits have cornered the market on eccentricity. You compete on a structured course with obstacles and challenges, using sheepdogs to help you get your avian victims cornered in a pen. Timing, of course, is everything.
There are even businesses that offer this “pastime” as a team-building exercise. Lord only knows what kind of business solutions these teams will come up with. And one can only hope the dogs aren’t connoisseurs of canard à l’orange.
And then there are the collectors.
There are some who collect navel fluff. I don’t know if they just collect their own, but the weirdness would be exponentially compounded if they start trying to collect other people’s.
I have disturbing visions of nurses in hospitals, creeping into patients’ rooms in the middle of the night, ostensibly to do obscure tests, only to filch their patient’s navel fluff to add to their clandestine collections. One can only wonder what they’re collecting it for. I shudder to think.
Then there are frequent flyers who collect in-flight barf bags.
One must only assume these would be pristine bags which haven’t yet been employed for their intended purpose. There are even clubs for these sick collectors to buy and trade bags among themselves in order to build out their collections, presumably when they can’t get a flight to Kathmandu, or fall asleep in-flight and forget to grab their prize. How do these maniacs even find each other?
Here are some other collections that are actually popular — and I ask again, how do these people find one another?
Banana stickers: those little labels that identify the distributors of tropical fruits.
Chamber pots: Just — EWW!
Bras: The largest collection in the world is owned by a man in China. You gotta wonder about this guy!
Ecstasy pills: Well, yeah, I can kinda see the point here. When you get too crazy collecting thousands of pills of different colours and types, at least you can swallow your duplicates.
My own brother collects rocks. A Bob Dylan fan, he thinks they’re the perfect gift, because “everybody must get stoned.”
I collect dog hair. I have a grocery bag stuffed to bursting with hair collected from five different Labradors, all of whom shed copious quantities twice a year.
So, five dogs multiplied by an average of eleven years, harvested twice a year equals 110 collection periods. With a couple dozen handfuls of puppyfluff each time, it’ll soon be time to start another bag. I have some vague notion of spinning it into yarn and making sweaters from it. Some day. Maybe…
Which, I suppose, makes me just as weird as any other collector.
Bev Hanna is a writer and published author. A recovering artist, she now teaches senior writers how to craft compelling stories and memoirs, and manages the Let’s Write group at the Askennonia Senior Centre.
