Document the life and death of your special interest here

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I just (like, half an hour ago) acquired a new obsession (collection-wise)! !! !!
------drumroll------GUITAR PICKS!! !

Medicine is intellectually my most apparent special interest, with Sherlock Holmes and 80's music as runner ups.

I am sad to say that my interest in North Korea has sort of reached its end. RIP North Korea S.I.

Well! Document your special interests here!

I am finding that as the days go by and I find I have less and less time for engaging in special interests, that dinosaurs are very slowly usurping Star Trek with regard to my attention. I'm trying not to let it happen, as I'm still very fond of ST and not ready to give it up yet, but I know much less about dinosaurs, so there is much more to be learned in that field.

Airplanes. Rockets, NASA research vehicles. Back in high school I could identify a specific airplane by the sound alone, and that was back in the 70's. Because of the math 'blindness' with NVLD, aerospace stayed a hobby except for taking up skydiving for ten years. I had to stop that because of financial issues, which again, are mostly due to NVLD.

It really sucks when the ability never comes close to aspiration.

I am verry merry berry interested in North Korea, eggspecially North Korean military songs accompanying North Korean military marches, possibly due to the perfection of the singing and the marching, such perfection possible only in totalitarian regimes like North Korea.

Most of my special interests are immortal, such that I never ever become uninterested in them, even when I am not super duper obsessed with them.

Instead, they live in a storage freezer at -80 degrees or a liquid nitrogen tank at -196 degrees until they are thawed to obsesserate again.

I have held onto my special interest in buttons (the kind you find on clothing) for as long as I can remember. I have jars of them sitting around my room, and carry a mini-mason jar filled with them everywhere I go. I used to sew them into my pants/coat pockets so I could stim on them without risking losing them, but I recently gave up that habit because I have a preference for a select few at this time and it would be very annoying and impractical to sew them into a new article of clothing every day. A friend of mine bought me a jar of buttons from an antique store as a surprise (without knowing just how much I love them) and was apparently quite surprised by my flap-happy reaction.

Other than buttons, I have been spending a lot of time knitting (about four hours a day) and watching the original Star Wars trilogy on VHS repeatedly.

I wish I hadn't lost my interest in Star Trek, but I can't watch it online anymore, so that had a part in killing it.

My book, film, earrings, purse and purple obsessions are very much in tact, but some others haven't fared so well....

Baseball -- I was a RABID Houston Astros fan from 1987 until 2009. I almost NEVER missed a game -- I attended many every year, and when I wasn't there I was watching on TV or listening to the game on the radio. I bought all kinds of souvenirs, went to Florida for Spring Training three times and to Cooperstown NY to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum twice. I lost my equally-obsessed baseball buddy in 2001 when she got married and eventually had kids. I tried to keep it up on my own, but when I moved from Houston to East Texas, there was little TV access and no radio access. That hurt some, and then my favorite players started retiring and then team started losing. When I finally got to watch again, I didn't recognize any of the players and because they were all playing so poorly, I didn't particularly want to. I still love the game, but I don't go out of my way to see games anymore.

KISS -- I totally worshipped that band from the time I first saw them on the Midnight Special in 1974 (I was 14) until when they appeared on TV without their makeup in 1984-ish. The interest continued but not as intently for a couple more years, and then eventually disappeared entirely.

Fingernail Polish -- When I was 16, I was a nailbiter (now I bite the dry skin around the sides and cuticles), and one day my grandmother gave me a manicure. It looked so nice that it broke me of nail biting, but it brought an obsession with nail polish. I bought polish every time I went shopping -- I had dozens of bottles -- and repainted my nails every other day or so. Not sure what broke the habit...

Seinfeld -- I never watched the show when it was on network. But when it went into syndication, I watched every episode that I could find, sometimes as many as 6 a day. I did that for months, and then the channels I was watching stopped carrying the show. That ended my obsession.

General Hospital -- started watching this soap opera during the summer of 1977, between and junior and senior years of high school. I got TOTALLY wrapped up in the whole Luke and Laura storyline in the early 80s. I had to quit watching when I had to go to work during the day, and didn't have any way of recording the episodes I was missing. I tried to watch it a few months ago, and couldn't make it through more than a few minutes.

MTV -- got into this when we got cable in 1983. I watched it as much as 16 hours a day for months. I -- more than once -- was late for class because the VJ announced that a certain video I liked at the time would be on in the next few minutes. I lost cable when I moved away from home and into my own place. When I finally got back to it a few years later, they had stopped showing videos. The End.

I have several minor special interests that rotate in and out of my brain. I'll get back into one of them and orbit it for a few weeks, then another will catch my attention for a while. Then I'll pick up one of the others again. These include genealogy, music, photography, world religions, gardening and philosophy.

I used to think that once I was done with a special interest, it went away forever, or that if I never became obsessive over something I enjoyed, it meant that I was "forcing it". But I'm beginning to realize that neither of those things is the case. Though I may become less obsessive over an interest as the years roll on, it doesn't mean that I have to stop loving it. And just because my enjoyment of something doesn't reach fever-pitch, it doesn't mean that I have to cast it aside. These have been surprisingly hard lessons to learn, especially for someone like me who has black & white thinking ("I have to be totally obsessed with it or I must not like it at all").

That being said, here are my special interests:

- Animation (of both the Western and Japanese varieties)
- Movies involving Tim Burton and/or Johnny Depp
- Video games (I'm actually not a gamer though; I'm just in it for the awesome characters! Thank God for Let's Plays!)
- Sewing (There's nothing more satisfying to me than making homemade plush dolls of my favorite fictional characters! I can also spend hours looking at other people's plush dolls on DeviantArt!)
- Crossover pairings (basically where you take two characters from different books/movies/TV shows/games/etc. and make them into a couple. I am absolutely addicted to making up my own, as well as seeing what other people come up with!)

Mine have always been the same, doubt they will ever change much.

The old version of Hawaii Five-O. When it came on during the afternoon I would sometimes call in sick to work just so I could watch an episode I had seen already. Now that it is on disc I no longer find it interesting.

Luggage zipper pulls from when I worked for an airline. Inside the baggage compartment of any airliner are detached zipper pulls from luggage. I'd volunteer to go inside those hot, cramped dark spaces to wrestle luggage in place so I could collect the zipper pulls that had already been torn off the zipper. I'm not sure how they got torn off, but they would be all over the floor sometimes. Now I have a huge pile of them and no longer work for the airline so they just sit and collect dust.

I've had many interests. Some of them tend to specify. E.g.:
Previous interest: Science Fiction (From kindergarten) > Star Wars (5th grade) > Old Republic Era (7th grade)
Present interest: Medicine (Last year) > Neurology/Psychiatry (Some months ago) > Autism Spectrum (Now)

Researching anything and everything all day pretty much (my parents sometimes give me topics to research for them)

Candy crush (this might not be a special interest as much as I just want to win and can't stop playing until I do)

Lastly, the real estate market. Been interested/obsessed in real estate for several years now.

The special interests that disappeared were planes, cycling, and cars.

Reading every book I could get my hands on was an obsession up until the age of 32 or so. Now, at 44, I've taken it up again.

Ebay was an all-consuming obsession for a few years. I quit a "regular job" so I could buy and sell full-time. That pretty much ended when the supply dropped on old video game systems (cartridge type).

Research: any topic. I will research until I cannot find any more new information. My research is conducted almost exclusively online.

I started a glass animal collection a year or so ago. I love the feel of heavy, smooth, cold glass. Just looking at my collection makes me feel happy and peaceful.