Whistle

Day 250: Whistle

I read an interesting article in the New York Times about people who visit every Disney park. There are fourteen, in places as far flung as Tokyo, Paris, and Orlando.

The article was surprisingly relevant to the stuff project. It quoted a professor at Oxford, author of "Understanding Fandom, who said that people love to collect, and that "obsessive niche travel" (as he called it) is a form of collecting.

Question: is getting rid of one thing every day for a year a form of collecting experiences? Now there's a paradox. Almost on a par with Spock speaking to his younger self in the most recent Star Trek movie.

I'll take it even deeper. Some people collect the experience of collecting experiences. Like A.J. Jacobs, who wrote The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible AND The Know-It-All: One Man's Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World AND My Life as an Experiment: One Man's Quest to Improve Himself AND Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Quest for Bodily Perfection. A.J. (the recipient of the only fan letter I've ever written - and he answered!) actually transformed himself and his life for each of these experimental years, at great cost to himself and his family. In The Year of Living Biblically, he never shaved his beard for God's sake! (Get it? For God's sake?)

A.J. Jacobs was the inspiration for this blog. His agent even said she might be interested in helping me find a publisher for a memoir about this year. I'm not sure how that will pan out. So far nothing I've done is cutting anywhere near as deep as not using zippers and stoning adulterers. Even so, I've fantasized about what my next resolution will be after I finish this project. My current idea: a year of whole foods. So maybe collecting experiences is addicting, like the professor said.

A clinical psychologist in the article speculated that obsessive niche travel fulfills the need to feel superior. Do I feel superior? I hope not. That would be against my own religion, such as it is. We Unitarians-Universalists believe first in the worth of every human being, and second in justice, equity and compassion. Feelings of superiority are to be guarded against.

One obsessive niche traveler (i.e., somebody who was aiming to visit all the Disney parks) talked about completion anxiety: once you've invested a certain amount of time and effort in an endeavor, you don't want to cheapen it by giving up. Well, on day 249, with nothing but a whistle to give away, I can certainly relate to that.

Completion anxiety. Yeah.