Current Mood: Alarmed

ma·ni·a (mā’nē-ə, mān’yə)   n. An excessively intense enthusiasm, interest, or desire; a craze: a mania for neatness. Psychiatry A manifestation of bipolar disorder, characterized by profuse and rapidly changing ideas, exaggerated sexuality, gaiety, or irritability, and decreased sleep. Violent abnormal behavior. See Synonyms at insanity. [Middle English, madness, from Late Latin, from Greek maniā; seemen-1 in Indo-European roots.] The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved

The list can go on and on and on. I’ve had several manias of my own:

• Secondlife
• Machinima
• Knitting
• Web design
• Scrap booking
• Camping

My list can go on, too.

While people view manias as bad things (the word “mania” tends to bring up negative ideas), they can have good results. Often people who experience manias want to do something that they don’t know very much about, so they learn it… voraciously. We read everything we can, we ask people in the know. Generally our manias produce something, so there is a tangible end result. This gives us a feeling of accomplishment. Unfortunately, we also end up abandoning projects before they are finished, much to the frustration of not only people around us, but also to ourselves. We just get burned out and lose interest. Sometimes we will return to the mania, but usually not.

Manias also tend to cost money. We have to buy the supplies that go with the mania. Knitting needs yarn and needles, scrapbooking needs paper and stickers, camping needs tents and bedding. Some of these hobbies can get pretty expensive. Anyone that has gotten involved in these projects will understand what I mean.

The reason I bring up this insanity at all is because my mother is currently in a mania. She’s buying vintage costume jewelry by the buckets. No, really. Daily she receives boxes and boxes of the stuff in the mail. And she wants me to make a website to sell them. Of course I will get a % of the profit, but I’ve been having a terrible time trying to put together enough time to make the site with a lot of household shenanigans continually going on. And she pesters me repeatedly about it. “Is the website done? When will we have a website? Have you been taking pictures?” And it drives me nuts. I love my mother, I really do. I understand her mania. However, I can’t join her mania, it’s not like it’s a light switch that I can just switch on. It could be because she has the fun of picking out the stuff, researching it, buying it (what girl doesn’t like shopping for jewelry?), getting packages in, going through all of the pretties… I get the work of taking pictures, editing pictures, building the website, processing the orders, shipping them. While these things are not unenjoyable, it is something that I have to have quiet time for. And solid amounts of it. An hour here, a couple of hours there… That’s not enough to get things done. Once the infrastructure is built then it should be a piece of cake to add new things. I hope.

On a good note, with my delay in building the site, she has run out of “mania money” to buy more stuff. However, she can afford a lot more “mania money” than me. She’s spent thousands on this. Yes, multiple thousands. So she does have a lot of investment into this, which I do respect, and I know she wants to earn the money back… and heck, I want money! So someday hopefully soon, you will see the unveiling of our new business. All built around her mania.