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Comic collectors who have had serious, hobby-related friction with a significant other, how did it resolve?
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Started by DavidTheDavid,

289 posts in this topic

Namtak

Namtak

Posted
Posted (edited)
12 minutes ago, wisbyron said:

You guys are kinda harsh! I feel like I'm in a saloon or something. Kav, you need to write your memoirs as soon as humanly possible

Why should he?is one of his ex trying to kill him?

Edited by Namtak
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MetalPSI

MetalPSI

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8 minutes ago, wisbyron said:

Because I find Kav to be a fantastic character and his exploits as a gentleman and a lover must be preserved!

Well have I got a bridge you'd fall in love with.

All for the fantastic price of Tree Fiddy

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kav

kav

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10 minutes ago, wisbyron said:

Because I find Kav to be a fantastic character and his exploits as a gentleman and a lover must be preserved!

One time I met this cute girl and she was fascinated by me.  We went out and made out a bit.  Few days later she calls up and says "I just want to be friends but I dont want to date you"  I replied "Well I'm kind of looking for someone to date so I wont bother you any more".  She said "But youre really interesting to talk to!  I still want to be friends!!"  I said "What do i get out of it?"  She said "What do you mean?"  I said you get someone interesting to talk to what do I get?"  Then I said bye and hung up.  She called back but I just let the phone ring like 20 times.  Game over.

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kav

kav

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I knew I could have just been her friend and waited for her to fall in love with me-I knew quite well how to accomplish this but I wanted to punch a hole in her arrogance.

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DavidTheDavid

DavidTheDavid

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Oh man, has this thread delivered or what? It's only fair that I share my experience. It's long and I don't want the mobile users out there to sprain their thumbs scrolling past my word wall.

Spoiler

When my wife and I met, I was 30, and comics hadn’t been part of my life for about a decade. I stopped collecting when I began my undergraduate degree as I simply had no interest. Sometime in my mid 20’s, after completing my bachelor’s work, I sold them lock stock and barrel to The Great Escape in Nashville, TN, in what felt like a finality.

Some years later, my wife started a doctoral degree in music. As you musicians know, music is rather all-consuming. As you academics know, doctoral degrees are rather all-consuming. Put together, I had lots of time on my hands.

Even better, I had left the classroom to become an instructional technologist at a time and in a place when campus, and sometimes district, leadership didn’t know what to do with us tech coaches. So here I had a desk job with plenty of down time that I used for online gaming, and in the course of playing one particular game like a complete addict, I got to the know developers who would eventually hire me to do customer service.

During this time, I was really into Warhammer Tabletop Fantasy, which meant I spent a lot of time in places that had comics or were “comic-adjacent” for geek culture, pop culture, gaming, etc. So comics were in my peripheral vision, though this wasn’t enough to get me started again.

At this point, I had idle hands, excess time, no children, a full-time k12 job with benefits, and extra money from the side gig. So what triggered the urge to collect again? The Marvel Cinematic Universe, baby. Oh man, you guys were there. That was fun, right!

So I hit the ‘Bay and away I went! I started where I left off years earlier and got a CGC 9.2 copy of New Gods #1, from @mycomicshop. From there, geesh, I won’t bore you, but I was really into buying and soon thereafter, selling as well. (Click my profile and check my kudos thread, it’s embarrassingly long! I used ComicLink and of course eBay as well).

To my regret, I had begun abusing alcohol and weed because, well, I liked it, and I probably have a genetic predisposition to addictive behaviors. My wife wasn't a partier, but grad school electronic-music types made things fun. What do we call those late night drunk purchases? Oh, and I was doing Tae Kwon Do. And got a second master's degree. How the cluck did I do all these things? Geesh.

As my wife approached the end of our degree, we decided it was now or never for a baby. For what it’s worth, we thought it was never after we had difficulty conceiving. But we did, at the last tic of the biological clock.

Sarah, oddly enough, had an interview for a position in my hometown, where she and I had lived before moving for her degree. I obtained an interview at the local magnet school, and because she was pregnant, we decided that should either of us have a job offer, we’d return to the ‘Boro. Sarah did not get the job, I did, she had the baby and became a mom.

So if you’re following this far, you will have realized that I had lost the extra time and, while I still had my moonlighting job, our finances were shifting with the move and impending birth of our kid. Not everything changed. For instance, my collecting compulsion didn’t change, nor did my substance use. Nor the TKD, but an injury would take care of that for me after I limped through black belt testing, though the same injury has incurred great cost over time.

Then, I changed careers. Education caused me great anxiety that I never controlled or treated, or let myself really recognize to be honest. I parlayed the instructional technology thing into an ed tech job, but began working as a contractor. This was a big drop in income, even with the second job, not to mention health care costs, costs exacerbated by a hip injury and deteriorating lumbar disc.

Perhaps the sports injury was a physical manifestation of my overall crash. I had reached a point playing fast and loose with consumer credit to buy and sell that I could no longer sustain. I quit drinking and had to explain to my wife, who approached financial matters by looking at the ten-foot-pole in front of her and complaining how heavy it would be to lift it and keep me at distance, that I had crapped up our finances.

I sold the bulk of my collection, spasmed back into some buying sprees with commission money or extra income, and finally sold almost everything off in waves.

So, dear readers, how’s my marriage these days? You’d have to ask her, I suppose, but we just returned from a vacation in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Georgia. I still don’t drink, though I do use D8 thc (it’s just so right). I am now a full employee working just one gig for the gaming company for whom I had moonlighted for so long. We weathered the pandemic together and no longer need a ten-foot-pole to discuss matters of comics or finances.

She has, with her usual good grace, made my peace with my now reasonable and properly focused comic collecting hobby. To be honest, my experience collecting keys from the advent of the MCU to whatever the clickety-cluck is happening now makes it super easy to collect in the shallow end of the pool.

I sit at home, working on games, spending about $100 to $150 a month on comics, eating my D8 gummies. I get laid like once or twice every three months, my seven-year-old talks incessantly, we invest properly and have stabilized our finances, though this pandemic can't end soon enough. What more could a guy want in life? Besides that Hulk #181 that I bought as a blue label 5.5 and had pressed into a 7.0? Other than that, and maybe the X-Men #1, blue label 1.0, I'm complete. Right? ;) 

 

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kav

kav

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12 minutes ago, DavidTheDavid said:

Somtimes, kav, you really come across as a 🍆.  :devil: :foryou:

I have plenty of stories like this that would curl your hair.  I hate entitled arrogant hot chicks.  I'm the lone vigilante of these types.  :acclaim:

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kav

kav

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INTERMISSION

I just learned that sea otters are predators on alligators!  These cuddly mammals rip out the alligator's throat and eat em!!!

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Randall Ries

Randall Ries

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3 hours ago, kav said:

THIS
once an ex hottie ages they become angry vindictive shrews very interested in cutting other peopl'e sex activities and judging.  Its incredible, really.  The 2 GFs I described were 2 different ones-the curvaceous one was literally queen of the world for a long time.  Dont know what ever happened to her but she is 54 now so you do the math.  And her mom was an ex hottie who at age 55 was walkin around in miniskirts trying to convince herself she was still hot.  She wasnt.  she was hideous with a saggy scary face.  I heard someone say once "That woman looks like a freak witch!"
The other GF went to a weekend gathering of friends that I didnt like to hang around cause they drank too much and I didnt drink at all.  There she got back with her ex who she broke up with because he's a drunk.  She was super susceptible to peer pressure and all her GFs wanted her to get back with him so they could all dtink.  
She came home and broke up with me.  

I'm sorry about that. I hate the active alcoholics attitude. What a terrible disease. I'm SUPPOSED to feel bad for them, but I don't. Even when they turn around and go to AA, they are difficult to deal with. The disease will be with them forever.

I had a girlfriend who was a drunk. She could drink. She would not pass or black out. She could just drink. She would start Friday night and stay up all weekend. Drinking and smoking. A case of beer and a box of that horrible lighter fluid called "Franzia". Wine in a box? What the hell was THAT? "Ah yes. Poisonous and yet not tepid. Oh! It's the 1:45 hour! A FINE vintage." Gross. I hated the person she became. Monday and it was time to go to work. She would have to put wine in a runners bottle so she could come down slowly without getting the DT's.

She looked like young Lea Thompson when I first met her. By the time I had enough, she looked like 1977 Elvis Presley. Horrible.

We don't miss people like that. While they used us, we can use them as a lesson in what we DON'T want in our lives. Let them make someone else miserable. They will likely end up alone and sick.

After a year of that, watching it get worse and listening to her whine about how much she missed her ex-husband, she screwed up royally and I broomed her out of my house. You know: You try to be there for people when they need help. But some people don't need help. They need support to continue their diseases. Some people have said "A whole YEAR of that?" Don't get all uppity. Some people go through DECADES of that.

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Randall Ries

Randall Ries

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4 hours ago, William-James88 said:

Toys take up way more space and dont have the same dignity as vintage comics. 

You tell someone you have a comic from world war 2 era, that's pretty cool. 

You tell them you have the latest Beast Wars Megatron toy that you got from Walmart and you get a wedgee.

People like vintage. Problem is a decent amount of time and our possible death has to happen before Wal-Mart toys will become "dignified". It's a tough sell. There's nothing dignified about Wal-Mart in the first place. But everything runs in cycles. 20 years from now, the toys of today or the day before yesterday will be "retro". Then people will forget them again. Then, 60 years from now, our middle aged great grandchildren will say "Hey, man. Look what I got! A Beast Wars Megatron mint in box!" "Aw DOOOD! The rare 'WAL-MART' edition! AWE-SIIIIIMMMM!!!!!"
 

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William-James88

William-James88

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5 minutes ago, Randall Ries said:

People like vintage. Problem is a decent amount of time and our possible death has to happen before Wal-Mart toys will become "dignified". It's a tough sell. There's nothing dignified about Wal-Mart in the first place. But everything runs in cycles. 20 years from now, the toys of today or the day before yesterday will be "retro". Then people will forget them again. Then, 60 years from now, our middle aged great grandchildren will say "Hey, man. Look what I got! A Beast Wars Megatron mint in box!" "Aw DOOOD! The rare 'WAL-MART' edition! AWE-SIIIIIMMMM!!!!!"
 

I dont even keep my toys mint in box :(

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