A bump in the road
I want to collect baseball cards as a hobby [maybe the last link between a childhood activity I can still participate in today] and for a moment I can visualize idealistic ways of looking for the ideal cards, maybe blogging about it, finding a nice card for a bargain, busting packs, sorting cards for leisure and just enjoying the process of collecting. However, I've come to the conclusion that I'm bummed out because collecting sucks.

I've become a clutterbug and collecting is really about organization - if everything is picked up for, organized and displayed on a regular basis, collecting might be fun again, but it isn't. As a kid, you can organize your cards because you more enthused [or enthralled] about it and you didn't have to worry about other things like time.

The writing is on the wall however - as I've gotten older, I've become more lazier and found, it takes more time to sort cards. My mind can't take it at times and I don't want to deal with the clutter. Who really wants to spend some time sorting cards, when you think about the other, cooler things you aren't doing in life.

It really captures how useless collecting is when I buy something and it just sits around - I realize you have the mentality of picking up stuff, but either your plans to do something with particular cards [oh, let's see if I could send those puppies out for autograph requests] never materializes or there isn't a plan at all [great, another pack of base cards, where there might be one card I might use for a random autograph endeavor].

I can't collect them all - I want to simplify the way I collect, but does it mean dumbing it down? I am depressed over a lack of theme to build upon, whether it towards a set or an invidual player and find being too much of a 'casual collector' leaves you with nothing of significance. I really need to be committed to a theme to make collecting work.

The sad fact is does it even matter? Why bother to collect when I figure 90 percent of collecting is just a thing 'to do,' 'buy into,' et al. How much is your collection really worth?

You find there is a ceiling to what you can pick up - You feel self-conscious because everyone else can [blow their wad] from fad to fad. You want to build up a strong, regional collection for example, but it is more complicated than just picking up cheap cards here and there of your favorite team and players.

Other collectors seem to have more sophisticated interests - while you look for simple, things.