Wow, two posts in one day. Anyway, I thought I’d expound a little bit on the last entry in terms of how I think and what I do to keep myself occupied. I make lists, and no sissy short ones, either. Long elaboratly detailed crazy lists that typically don’t have endings and need to be kept up weekly, sometimes daily. I do this when I’m bored, or when I feel like I need a new project or whatever.
The in print DVD list below is a small example of this behavior. That list took me four hours to compile, copying and pasting all the links, formating it in Libsyn’s blog engine, and then editing and fixing bugs. You can also see examples of this in the “Links” section to the left with my DVD collection and my library (I say my but I mean ours, as my finacee Carrie is silently included in both, though my section of the DVD collection is pretty much the majority of what we own.) Anyway, since I’m a big fan of hitting Best Buy on new DVD Tuesday the DVD collection list is one that I am frequently changing.
My favorite and probably most intensive list is my Complete Great List of Movies I’ve Seen. This is a word document that I started three years ago when I was bored at work. I had been flipping though my old copy of the guide to VHS and DVD 1997 edition one day and I started highlighting all the flicks I’d seen, much in the way that the Ione Sky character highlighted words in her massive dictionary in Say Anything. After I was finished with that little boredom project, I figured since there was only a handful of years between the end of that book and the present, that I’d put it all in a word doc. So I spent the next month transcribing movies in alpha order, trying to fill in the gaps as I went along. I hit www.imdb.com and started flipping through their database to get some and then I also picked up a new edition of the VHS and DVD guide to help as well.
When I was finished with the basic list I had become so addicted to working on it that I decided to overhaul it, going through and marking all the flicks I owned. But that wasn’t enough, oh no. I also had to put notations for all the flicks that I saw in the theatre, then I marked all the flicks that I wanted to own buy hadn’t yet. That lead to marking all the movies with a series of coded notations which showed who I saw the flick with. When that was done I also added the number of times, roughly, that I’d seen each flick.
Basically what I ended up with was a large piece of who I am in seriously anal statistical form. After I calculated the numbers for each notation, I got a weird picture of who I was in relation to the ginormous amount of films I’d seen and with who. For instance, even though I have a regular movie night with a friend (that we’ve been holding for roughly four years) and who I’ve known for like 15 yeas, I’ve still seeen twice as many flicks with my fiancee even though I’ve only know her half as long.
Hi, my name is Shawn and I make lists. Really freaking large ones.
