Signs of Something

Sometimes the stars just align in a certain way so that the world is trying desperately to tell you something, and then fate makes decisions for you. It doesn't usually happen like that for me, so it's particularly weird that it happened twice in one day on Monday.

First of all, in three completely separate conversations I was either participating in directly or hearing secondhand the movie The Godfather was brought up. Apparently I need to watch that movie again.

The other one is a bit more interesting to me, as it's changed the way I think about something. On Monday, two different blogs I read posted on precisely the same topic - collecting. Record Store Geek posted a link to an article about how the downloading of music has changed the nature of music collections, and James Tata posted an excerpt from a book he's reading in which the main character is a collector. When I first glanced at the passage he posted, I thought, "Yeah, but the word 'collection' really only applies to things you don't use, like state spoons or action figures, right?" Upon further inspection, however, this line caught my eye:

Someone who hesitates, who asks, Do I need this? Is this really necessary? is not a collector. A collection is always more than is necessary.

This, my friends, is how I am with shoes. It's never about need.

I suppose, then, that what I have is not a closet full of shoes but rather a collection of shoes. It just happens to be a collection I can wear.