I don’t know why we’re compelled to delay our personal changes and resolutions to a calendrical system when any given day might be used to implement a change in our lifestyles, but here we are once again, balancing drunkenly on the cusp of a new year with a sure-as-hell grimace of determination on our faces. Sure, there are all kind of personal life goals I’m setting for the upcoming year – finish at least two comics, seek out publication once again, reduce debts, lose the gut, move far away and never look back – but what, as a collector, do I need to change in order to keep collecting enjoyable in an increasingly practical world?

FIRST, I know that I’ve stopped finding joy in being a completist. I do not need to own every action figure in a set in order to find satisfaction in it anymore – a compulsion that I’ve struggled with for many years. As a result of this, many complete assortments of things jam every corner of my closets – and only about 65% of these items are truly enjoyable. The rest, those obligatory items only there for the sake of ‘completion’, are on their way out. In my defense, these sets usually pan out to be much cheaper when you purchase the whole shebang. Collect what you love, not what you think you should collect.

Surely the decision to divide up families of items will make the collector-venture-capitalists out there shudder. You can’t read a comic if you expect it to be worth anything, and for the love of God, you can’t break up a set of things! I’ve realized that I’m the kind of collector who really enjoys items on an individual basis. I don’t need that anorexic Black Canary figure from the second set of Identity Crisis figures from DC Direct – it’s ugly, I already have far better Black Canary figures, and it takes up space. Ergo, she goes to eBay, and there will be no regrets. Once you start collecting things that you don’t like just because you feel obligated to, the joy begins to vanish, and I’ve been on the precipice between enjoyment and frustration for a while. I have friends who only permit themselves a single figure of each character – which is a concession that I’m not yet willing to make.

SECOND, I’d like to do a much better job of cataloguing what I DO have. More often than I’d like to admit, I find identical items on opposite ends of the room, purchased months apart because the first item was forgotten. The backlog of stuff that I have around is overwhelming, but I’m finding that Collectors’ Quest’s own community section allows me to keep an accurate tab on what I have, with as much or as little detail as I need. I’m not saying this because they write the paychecks, but it’s genuinely helpful to be able to access a visual database of previous acquisitions to prevent duplicating myself. I’ve done so often, it’s saved me from superfluous purchases, it’s much easier than digging through a vat of things, and best of all, it’s free. I consider this to be the second of many money-saving measures.

THIRD, start using what I already have before I start acquiring more. While it’s probably not a common goal among collectors, I collect with the pretense of creativity. I collect spare parts of things for photos and sculptures, I collect scraps for collages, and generally, I can make use of everything ever created or discarded by mankind, all in the name of ‘making something awesome’. I never look at anything without already imagining how I can take it apart and repurpose it.

So, where is all of this ‘awesome’? I haven’t made most of it yet. I spend so much time collecting things with so many creative goals that I often don’t get to even take the first steps towards these goal. It’s like filling a car with gas, and then realizing that all you have is a whole mess of car parts that you need to assemble first. You know, after you assemble the other six piles of car parts that you’ve collected – at least in my case. So, resolution number three is to use what I have, thereby making ‘awesome’ things and making room for further awesomeness.

These resolutions are about reduction and efficiency, though I retain a few ongoing goals with the express purpose of good ol’ collecting. I’d like to double my respectable NES game collection, minus the vast quantity of sports games that I can ignore. I’d also like to regain focus on my voice-o-graph collection, as I’ve let far too many auctions slip by forgotten, and to lose these one-of-a-kind items is to possibly lose them forever. I can’t trust that anyone else is going to preserve them like I am.

Here’s to another year full of smart collecting, folks!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 2:00 am and is filed under collecting fyi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.