Just the five. Husbands should be like Kleenex: soft, strong, and disposable

Wmchicago posted a great blog a little while back (seriously, how many home runs can you hit in a row?!) about awesome t-shirts. My immediate response was my latest acquisition, an automatic conversation starter in a room full of people when you don't feel like doing the actual work, and social filter that percolates the morons from... well, everyone else. It's like when I used to wear my Guster t-shirt(s) on BYU campus, hoping to find fellow Gusterrhoids... my Posse and I used to have two questions to determine Potential Friendship: 1) Do you like curry? and 2) Do you like Guster? Which worked well until I met someone who loved curry AND Guster and turned out to be a psycho-freak anyway... I dropped my criteria after that.

Anyway, I digress. Thinking upon awesome t-shirts dredged up the memory of my Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt collection which still continues, in moderation, to this day. My very first HRC shirt was purchased in none other than Washington, D.C. at the tender age of um, eighth grade (12? 13?) Sadly it was retired to the rag sack somewhere around the beginning of college.

This led me to ponder on the other collections I've had over the years. I'm quite a serial collector; I like things that come in sets, because you don't have to exert the mental power every time to decide whether or not you want it... it's automatically cool by association. So yes, here we go, another bulleted list for your review:

• The Babysitters Club: Oh yeah, I was totally subject to the fads of the day. I completely remember the day they announced that The Babysitters Club were the most popular books in our fifth grade French Road Elementary School and how we shrieked (the pre-pubescent boys groaning... they'll never learn). Remember how the girls on the covers of the books looked to be about twenty-five, when really they were only supposed to be eleven and thirteen...? Creepy. I was sent this blog a few months ago by some friends from the third grade. We relived memories. In the same category (pre-teen books) fall Sweet Valley High, Fear Street by R.L. Stine, anything by Christopher Pike, and carried to today, Harry Potter, The Bartimaeus Trilogy, and The Chronicles of Narnia.
  
• Trolls: This really is one of those "ew, what was I thinking?!" fads. Yes, I was completely swept up in the marketing campaigns of the early 90's. I think my mom mercifully threw them all away when we moved two years ago, though I wonder how much they'd fetch on eBay... remind me what the point of those were again?
• Hard Rock Cafe T-shirts and pins: My navy blue L.L.Bean backpack used to be my display case of all my awesome pins until my favorite one, a first edition Taipei Chiang Kai-Shek memorial, fell off and was forever lost. Now they're all in a little plastic baggie... somewhere... off of the top of my head I have paraphenelia from 15 different cities. This is the one collection I've kept up, as said before. I'm such a nerd.
• The requisite Barbies, My Little Ponies... Moon...beams? They were dolls that glowed in the dark. I had two of those. They were precious to me.
• Beanie Babies: I didn't quite fall prey to this as much as others (my freshman roommate literally owned every single one... I guess being a multi-millionaire from Kansas leaves you with very little else to do) but I still own a Garcia Peace bear and a shark. It's the only one at the time that actually had a mouth. We used to attack ourselves with it in middle-school orchestra. I know. I know. Nerd.

I know you've got all sorts of collections out there, don't deny it. This days I mostly collect Patak's curry pastes and cool colored pens from Taiwan. And shoes...

Fess up!