Obsession: by Spyke

I was talking to my roommate from 2nd year of uni today. He is, and has always been, a very 'guy' guy - a bloke, if you happen to speak England English. He drinks a lot of beer and likes a lot of sport. He fails to complete the stereotype in that he was in a loving, monogamous relationship for the 3 years we were at uni, but still, you get the idea.

Now, the two main sports that he got very excited about were football and cricket. Over the course of the year his love of football rubbed off on me, the cricket did not. Speaking to him today, however, I informed him that I'd taken an interest in it now, having been invited to join a fantasy cricket league with other friends. His response surprised me for several reasons.

Firstly, I should explain that he and I are not close in the way that some guy friends are. We don't hug, we don't compliment each other apart from in exceptional circumstances, and we don't tell each other our problems and feelings. Since I do this with all my other guy friends, I'm going to put this down largely to his "blokeishness". Which is why I was surprised when he came out with his response, something that shows he's noticed something about me that none of my other friends have, that I never even noticed about myself. What he said was "And you've got an obsessive personality haven't you, so now you'll get obsessed with it."

And he's absolutely right. I cannot take an interest in anything without becoming obsessed with it. That football interest of his that rubbed off on me? Before I lived with him, I didn't give a fuck about football. Now I could probably name at least 300 of the 500+ players in the Premier League + a few more from the Italian and Spanish leagues, and tell you what clubs most of them used to play for. And it's not just football, it's any musician or TV show or anything that I've ever been interested in. I get obsessed with certain types of food - I ate peanut butter sandwiches every day for 12 years. I'm even now getting obsessed with the fucking idea that I am obsessive. When I told all this to one of my best friends, she responded: "Ironically [grr] it's a sign of high intelligence. It means that if you take an interest in your career, you'll be astounding at it. Look at all the successful people in the world, they're all obsessive. I always knew you had to be good at something but I never realised...this is it, isn't it?"

I forget what the point of this post was. It may have been how someone can know you so well without you realising, it may have been how stunned I am that I never noticed such a major aspect of my personality. But there it is. I am Obsessive, if hopefully not Compulsive.