Jane of All Trades

One of the women whose blogs I read regularly recently wrote about her frequent, bizarre obsessions and asked readers to comment. It turns out that she is not alone. At all.

I currently have a mountain of knitting needles and half-used skeins of yarn mocking me from my bedroom closet, tackle boxes full of beads and beading supplies piling up in our storage area, and a broken sewing machine surrounded by scraps of fabric collecting dust in the hall closet.

I did (finally) manage to donate all of my unused scrapbooking supplies, stuff I'd bought for a hobby I never even began.

I think my problem goes a tad farther than crafting. I am also a serial foreign language student. In school, I studied Spanish, German, French, and Italian. "Wow!" you're thinking, "she's so poly-lingual!" But I'm not. I studied each of them just far enough so that I'm not fluent in any of them. Muy, sehr, tres, and molto USELESS.

I've also noticed about myself that lately every book I read becomes my new obsession, my new crusade. I read E.D. Hirsch's The Schools We Need and promptly set about trying to find a Core Knowledge school to target for my next teaching job. Then, I read Alfie Kohn's response to Hirsch's book and quickly flung myself from the Core Knowledge bandwagon.

When I read Quantum Wellness, I decided I needed to become vegan. I swung from doing a low-carb diet to an almost entirely vegan diet nearly overnight. Now I'm back to my previous omnivore diet (which also has a little bit of Special K diet thrown in for good measure).

I've always felt that I was a very self-assured person, strong in my opinions. One way to view all this obsessiveness is that I'm choosing books based on my strong interest, so it's not surprising that something already intriguing to me would become even more so after reading an expert's take.

But I am a worrier. So my way of looking at it is: what is wrong with me that I am so easily swayed by the views of others? That I jump from one obsession to the next, and the next? It also makes me question my commitment to my current obsessions since (judging by past experience) they could go the way of the dodo any minute now.

Some would say this is the curse of the modern housewife/mother: she's too educated to simply sit around, cook, clean, and tend babies. She needs something intellectual, something challenging, something beyond her daily domestic duties in order to feel like a success. Is that what's going on with me? I really don't know. I'll let you know after I find a book about it. (Or maybe I should just go read Twlight. Again.)
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