You know how the saying ends.
And now, prepare yourself for the photos to prove it.
I’ve had the recent experience of going through memorabilia from my childhood and realizing that this person I am now who collects things is the person I’ve always been. I still collect some thing-things, but all the tallies I keep are proof to myself that I collect less-thingy things as well, like deer sightings, meals eaten at Tandem, waterski sessions, and a log of all the letters I’ve written to friends since 2015.
When I was a child, I thought like a child. I ordered toys from cereal boxes. I collected the 101 Dalmations from McDonald’s Happy Meals.
I collected buttons and kept a log of them in a ledger with corresponding number stickers stuck to the back of each button.
I rode mine and my sister’s dirt bike around the country roads where we lived to collect Pepsi Points from empty bottles thrown into the ditches so I could order things like beach towels, t-shirts, hacky sacks, and the like.
I was a sucker for free stuff and I still am: Wednesday is my favorite day of the week because it’s the day that, while I eat my omelet at 11:30, I get to sit with my computer and look at the new Publix weekly sales flyer online and write down the BOGO deals I want to shop for in the coming week.
I’m also a sucker for fun/crazy food experiences, or maybe I should call them marketing experiments to see how dumb we are to think some of these products are food. As a child, I fell for the marketing ploys for green ketchup and rainbow-colored microwave popcorn that I’d pop in the school lunchroom microwave and feel so cool while eating. As an adult, I snap photos of things I see on grocery store shelves that make me cringe but simultaneously make me feel excited to add to my collection of photos (the album on my phone is called “Crazy Food”).
Are you having fun yet? How many should I show you?
This last one I didn’t actually see for myself at the store, but I saw this funny meme declaring that some brilliant person finally gave us Oreo-flavored Oreos!
The collections I’m proudest of are my binder of Milk Mustache celebrity ads and my bin of Altoids paraphernalia. It was in high school that I first started collecting and logging the Milk Mustache ads and I was very committed during my college years to adding to this collection.
I was very into Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen for a number of years back then.
I remember going to thrift stores in college to look for old copies of magazines like Good Housekeeping, People, and Fitness to find specific months’ issues that I knew (from looking at lists people posted online) held certain ads I didn’t already have. I started collecting other magazine ads during these years as well, from M&Ms to LifeSavers to Ritz Crackers to Heinz ketchup (notice the actual photo I took of a ketchup bottle in my parents’ fridge) to Nike to Evian. I went after ads that I could find in a series and I put the ads in plastic sleeves and collected them the way I do with recipes now. I have hundreds of product ads similar to the sampling below. It took me several hours recently to look through all four binders of ads, but I felt affirmed in my identity as a collector to see that what delighted me then still delights me today.
I entered a Milk Mustache ad campaign contest with this caption and photo from our wedding reception, and I’m pretty proud of it even though it floors me to realize we served our guests milk with the wedding cake and today all I’d want to have at a wedding is wine. I don’t even believe in cow’s milk anymore, so I guess one aspect of then vs. now didn’t hold true forever.
During my ad agency years in Orlando, after being married and before having kids, I framed all my Altoids ads and TJ helped me hang them on the wall in my office at work. I was so proud of this collection and still am. I don’t remember where I got the Altoids postcards or the cardboard display, and I assume I bought all the tins over time as I saw them at grocery stores. Pulling these items out of the Rubbermaid bin where they live in our garage, and holding each piece, and setting them out one by one was like spending time with my college and early-adult self. She fascinated me with these curious obsessions.
You already know I’m a big collector of quotes in commonplace books, and poems in my memory, and shark teeth from the beach. It would be accurate to say I also collect friends and I am as lucky and rich in friendship as one could ever hope to be. But today it feels most pertinent to say I’m collecting Taylor Swift concert experiences and friendship bracelets.
Atlanta - April 29, 2023
Sydney, Australia - February 23, 2024
Not pictured yet is my Taylor Swift concert in Scotland in June and the bracelets I’ll collect there.
The only thing I can think of that would make me love Taylor more right now is if she had made a milk mustache ad.