Wish list archaeology

I got some robot-generated email from Amazon.com today telling me there's no shipping address associated with my wish list. So I rectified that little error and decided to revisit exactly what was on my list. It's sort of a record of my interests over seven years, and as I clicked through page after page, I occasionally saw something and muttered, "Why did I put that on there?"

However, it was more interesting to me to see what interests flare up, which wane and which burn steadily.  I went through and edited out some of the older items, so my flash-in-the-pan manias are no longer in evidence, save the one that hit last Tuesday when I decided I wanted to revisit my girlhood habit of doing counted cross-stitch. (I figure we'll leave that there until the urge to do needlepoint passes.) But seven pages of items gives one a decent idea of where their interests really are. Apparently, I like comics and consumer culture and the fantasy that someday, someone will buy me the entire Star Blazers: Quest for Iscandar series on DVD.

Insofar as accidental historical ephemera goes, it was a fun experience. So I'm throwing it open to you all. Have you looked at your wish lists lately? Do you have anything on there where you're like, "Oh, thank goodness nobody actually bought that for me?" Anything remind you that oh, yeah, you really are the kind of person who'd like to know more about Civil War re-enactors or stained glass art?

Comments

[mindy]

My dad and brother generally holiday shop for me off that list, so every November I make sure to temporarily remove anything non-family-friendly, just to save us all the embarrassment.

[Siobhan]

I have the same experience with my Netflix queue. I've got it maxed out, and since I'm not the speediest with my film-watching, and list-obsessive, I find myself getting shit that I put on two years ago that I have never heard of in my life and thinking "what the hell am I watching this for?"

[Polly]

And, of course, I just read Siobhan's post after adding Star Blazers to my Netflix queue....

[Brianne]

Amazon's recommendations have been a little screwed up lately because there are apparently two authors named Jon Stewart. One of them is an expert on Kierkegaard and the other wrote America: The Book.

[Antoinette]

My family tends to order off Amazon wish lists without checking first, so I have received some "huh?" gifts in the past of things that had been on the back pages of my list for years.

This holiday season I accidentally deleted my entire wish list, and then had to repopulate it in a panic because family was bugging me. It was both sad and a relief to lose all those years of past enthusiasms.

Star Blazers! I loved that as a kid -- I might have to add it to my list too. Heh.

[Dellface]

Like Antoinette, last Christmas I received something I had put on my wish list shortly after I bought my house: outdoor speakers for my deck. However, in the 3 years I've lived there, the amount of time I've spent on my deck really doesn't warrant the amount of time and trouble it will take to install them. I really should have cleaned up the wish list, huh? Who knew he would go that far back?