LIFE-LONG "Special Interest"?

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It doesn't even have to be one that you've done non-stop----like, you may have even taken breaks, from it, for a year or two----but, one that you can't ever remember when you weren't interested in it.

One of mine, is fashion. There have been times when all I wanted to do was draw fashions (design); then, there's been times when all I wanted to do, was sew fashions; then, there have been times when just reading about it / watching it on TV, was enough----but, I can't ever remember a time when I wasn't interested in it.

I've been interested in the weather nonstop since the age of 7. That's 47 years!

I've always loved unicorns and babies. My brother has always been obsessed with jets.

- Boats and ships and naval warfare. Needless to say I much enjoyed Assassin's Creed Black Flag.

- Vacuum cleaners. Just don't turn one on around me because I can't stand the noise. Such cruel irony, that.

My current interest has been for almost a year now and I think that's the longest ever.

I might have had it before then if it weren't for the fact that I had no real contact with technology until I was 14.

I have no idea for how much longer I'll be interested in this. Right now it seems like it will be for my whole life, but there's a good chance that it'll fade away like the rest of my interests have done, and I'll be left with a whole bunch of knowledge about something I don't care about.

none of my interests are life-long.

My fascination with insects began very early (around age two), and has been in effect all my life albeit with varying degrees of intensity.

The focus has shifted a few times, but all of them fell into the nature category. The longest one was all things equine, I saved up to buy my first pony; he tried to kill me on a few occasions by taking the bit and charging through low branch wooded areas, but I didn't care, I learned to stay away from trees!

I have loved computers and information systems ever since I was young. I played with my first one at the Lawrence Livermore Lab, when in elementary school over 45 years ago. One of my birthday parties, was at a local timeshare lab, where I got to play computer games on the teletype. I was in heaven.

I later took my first programming class (BASIC on a mainframe) in 9th grade back in 1977. My major in college was in Computer and Information Systems. I have been working (professionally) with software technology since 1986.

I am not certain it counts as a special interest though.

As long as I can remember I have been interested in religions. I still am and learn as much about them as I can. Not just in what they believe, but in how they practice, what their culture is like, etc. I'd love to go to a service at every single religious place out there, or at least in every type.

My top ten ones I would love to see;

1. Signs Following. That's "Snake Handling" to you. They don't make anybody else do it. I'd sit in the back. Maybe with a mongoose or something. They don't just handle rattlers and cottonmouths and copperheads, they drink kerosine and strichnyne and all the poisons. They preach a good hellfire and brimstone service with lots of shouting, sweating, women with big hair, electric guitars, men in short sleeve dress shirts, hopping around (not dancing, that's sinful) and speaking in tongues and getting slain in the spirit. I sound like I'm making fun of it but I'm not at all. I really want to see it. I love the energy in those kind of fundie services. I like to get caught up in it even though while I believe in everything, I don't believe in it the same way they do.


2. A Mormon Temple service. Mainly because it's secret. I can't help it. However I am very interested in Mormon religion and I'd like to go to a regular service and also find out more about their religion. Oddly enough, while we have the Jehovah's Witnesses all over the damn place here, I can't get a Mormon missionary to bike up to my door to save my life. I'd keep him talking forever! But I'm not calling them to come, I'd just like one to stop by.

3. All of the types of Jewish services. Reform, Conservative and Orthodox. I'd love to go to one.

4. A high Episcopal service. I just want to see how Catholic it really is. Never been.

5. Muslim prayers. I don't know if I could even go to where the women go because I'm not Muslim, but I'd like to go

6. A Hindu wedding. I know it's not a service, but it's got religious overtones. I'm interested and curious and it seems like the only thing in the Hindu religion you can go to. I'd also like to put Mhendi tats on my hands.

7. An Amish service, in Pennsylvania Dutch, with an interpreter. I've always been interested in the Amish.

8. I want to see the fake Druids do their neopagan stuff at Stonehenge. Mainly because they are new and made up and all kind of halfway fluffy bunny Wiccan and I want to see how much I can spot there that they have gotten from Buckland, or maybe Buckland wrote a book about Druidry, I don't know. Buckland is everything Pagan anyway, and if you didn't know that, he will tell you.

9. Quakers. Just because.

10. A home church service with one of those Quiverfull ultra Fundie groups.

I wouldn't go to make fun of any of these. Except the fake Druids. Nothing I say down here applies to the fake Druids. You shouldn't be able to fill out a form on a website and be a Druid. No. But for the rest, I'd love to spend time with the clergy and talk to them and people in those churches and just go and enjoy it. Thats the problem with not being a Christian in the South. You can't go to church because they will bug you to death until you get saved or run them off with a shotgun. You can't swing a dead cat in my town without hitting a church. There are over a hundred churches here in this town and the area right outside of town, and that isn't counting Blocton or Greenpond. They have plenty more there too. But, I would actually enjoy going to a service at a different church here in town every Sunday, but everybody knows I'm not like them and most think I'm a devil worshipper (I'm Pagan, but Catholic on paper and I also believe that all religions are right and they work, I just don't think they are exclusive. I also like to go to Catholic mass and confession from time to time because I still believe in that). Because they think I'm a devil worshipper, I wouldn't have much of a chance of getting out of there unaccosted and loved to the point of smothering. They would bug the crap out of me and ask a million questions and want to come see me and then WANT ME BACK THE NEXT WEEK. They wouldn't stop. Even if I told them I was just coming because I wanted to see theirs and I like religion. They would think Jesus planted a seed in my heart and it was their job to water it and I'd be killed under a ton of their nurturing fertilizer. So, I can't do that. If I still lived in the city I would do it. Nobody bothers you much there. They also don't know who you are, which is not a luxury those of us in small towns have.

Go to YouTube and look at videos of the April 11th tornado that hit Tuscaloosa and also of where it was in Bibb County. I like that one where they are in the mall parking lot and it hits Belk. The one passenger in the car keeps saying "Oh s**t, oh s**t, oh f**k oh f**k" and then he says "Lets get the hell out of here" but he says that after the tornado has touched down about 50 yards from them and they had watched it get closer and hit and then move away. I didn't have power for a week because of that. The one video where it shows that first big one touch down, I was watching live on tv when our power went out. Nothing hit my part of Bibb though, but it did do a lot of damage up the road in Eoline. You'll see some closeup s**t on videos of Southern tornadoes. We will go right up to them. We are afraid of them but we are used to them, and we have all studied and learned how they move and how to be safe when filming one. Besides, James Spann holds a class for that. You can go find out free. Southerners will run and hide when we get snow flurries but if a tornado touches down anyplace we can possibly see any part of it we run outside to look at it and only go in if it gets close. Some people get in their cars to go look at it closer. Really.

Acording to everyone I know - the most useless interest ever..
I have been fascinated with aliens since I was 4 years old, after all, its them that abandoned me here dont know, but maybe it was that "feeling" that triggered the interest to begin with.

Languages. I started when I was 7 and have never really stopped, although the intensity of the interest has varied over the years. Currently I'm learning Yiddish, which brings the total to about fourteen (I say 'about' because I've rather lost count).

I'm also interested in religions, although not to the same degree as OliveOilMom (By the way Olive, you should go to a Greek Orthodox service one day, I think you'd enjoy it, the monks with beards and pony-tails and wonderful chants. If not Greek, then Russian, Romanian, Serb would be very similar).

Another life-long interest of mine, has been PEOPLE----or, I guess, psychology. I'm one of those seemingly rare, social Aspies, and I'm always interested in what makes people tick.

I would like to find mine...





Or maybe I have except I'm not sure if it counts at all. I'm obsessed in visualizing, and how to make visualized things a reality by any means. (Either turned it into a plain drawing/animated, programmed, crafted/created out of simply something) Whatever makes it close into a physical evidence. Either by means of imagination or a memory.
I'm more into the artistic side than the psychology and mechanical sides.
Sometimes I kinda think defying the law of physics **IRL** by means of making the visualized thing come true would be a dream come true...

I've been to two different types of Greek Orthodox churches but never to a service. Here is the back story on those visits, it's fairly interesting.

Remember that Catholic priest who was in the media a lot in the 1990s who thought it was not only ok but required to kill abortion doctors? Fr David Trosch was his name. He was on a lot of talk shows and everything. He lost his congregation but not his faculties so he was still a priest, just on his own with no salary or anything. He got kicked out because he wrong this big thing and tried to spin stuff around to show that through the existing laws and doctrines of the Church, along with Scripture it was justifiable homicide to kill those doctors and he gave it to his bishop and sent a copy to the pope. s**t hit the fan over this and they made him quit working but he hadn't done anything illegal he just wouldn't change his mind. I've read his paper and his logic holds but that doesn't mean it's correct. Some things have since been changed so nobody can make that assumption again, but he was technically right but wrong in every other sense. He had some money put back and so he got land and a trailer and started a website. He also started going on talk shows. He was never actively involved in any killings but he knew Paul Hill and Eric Robert Rudolph and he told them his thoughts about it before they did what they did. Still not illegal though, so they couldn't take away his faculties or "defrock" him. They just didn't let him do anything, and they were right not to. He was a stubborn old guy and never backed down on his interpretation. He also had a lot of other backward, archaic and almost unsavory views which I was to learn later one, but around the time I had started writing for the paper I saw Father on Geraldo. They said he lived in Mobile. I did not have the internet then but I had a phone and long distance. I wanted to interview him. I called information.

He had a listed number which surprised me and at the time despite being pro choice, a feminist and pro gay rights I was a devout Catholic and I treated him with the respect I would any priest and asked if I could please interview him, told him my pro choice position and my religion and told him I would be nice. He said of course I could interview him. I did and then he asked me about the church I went to, my family, etc. We talked after the interview for about an hour. We disagreed on the abortion issue but he wasn't ugly about it and was never once ugly to me about my views in the entire time I knew him until his death and I was never ugly to him about his. I wasn't having abortions, he wasn't killing doctors so it was basically all academic, even though he encouraged people to do it, I think they would have done it anyway because crazy is crazy and they shot doctors before him too.

Anyhow, one of the things in the Church we talked about that first time was the Latin Mass which he thought should come back. I am a huge fan of it and we talked about that for a while and he got my address and sent me information on it and a long letter explaining a lot of things about it and the regular Mass which I didn't know. We talked on the phone many times and he came to visit us at Easter a few years later. By this time we were both fully aware of each others views and disagreed strongly about them. He was very antiwoman and thought we shouldn't even vote etc because we aren't as smart as men, etc yet I was a close friend of his and he would ask me for advice about some things and not just how to cook this or wash that. I pointed that out to him, the irony of that and he said "You're different. You probably have the devil in you and I'm being a good influence" and laughed. That was his way of saying "I don't know and it scares me that I might be wrong so we won't talk about it". He disliked a lot of things and we argued a lot but never got ugly. I could look past his views and he could look past mine and we had a lot of other things in common. We were best friends for several years during the time he came to my house for Easter weekend. We talked about EVERYTHING. Sometimes I'd forget he was a priest even though I called him "Father". Not Father David, or even just David like my husband calls his priest friend by only his first name, but Father like that was his name or something.

He was nothing like how I imagined him to be. I wanted to hate him and was prepared to for a long time. He would piss me off sometimes but I never hated him and I did love him and wished he would change and tried to change him and I even talked to his Bishop about him and asked if I could do anything to help fix him and he said no, just be his friend. He needs to see that you can still be Catholic and not agree with him. That was easy, I did that. Most of the time we argued about women's rights and I'd rarely remember he thought you should kill abortion doctors. He didn't talk about it much either, he made it a big deal for his "ministry" (website and talk shows) but it wasn't the biggest thing to him. The biggest thing to him was dragging the Church back to the 13th century where he felt it belonged, and all the Catholics with it. He was a fan of the Inquisition. Yet he was a really nice guy. Weird opinions, hateful opinions, but so nice I couldn't hate him. He knew if push came to shove I'd take a stance against him, and my article was written in the stance against him but I didn't portray him rudely or badly in it. I said he was surprisingly nice and friendly and I looked forward to talking to him again about the Latin Mass. I pointed out how you could easily forget the things you didn't like about him, but I took a hardline pro choice stance and condemned his Philadelphia Lawyer type paper is "the worst kind of spin, the kind that makes you think it's true because when you read it, logic dictates that he's right when he's 99 kinds of wrong" and that his talk show activism was his idea of "nailing it to the cathedral door" (a tie in with the 99 kinds of wrong and Luther and his thesis).

Anyway, Father came down on Thursday afternoon so he could be here for the full Easter weekend because he was celebrating Mass at our house. He had to do it by law every day except Good Friday when no Mass can be celebrated, but he cannot do it publicly in a church but he can do it privately in a home with others present. That was one of the rules they gave him when they sort of fired him. So he had already said Mass that morning and he came in and got settled and we all watched tv. Friday we went sight seeing and he wanted to see some churches in town. He liked churches and religions too, so we talked about that a lot. He liked them and was interested in them but always told me how they were all going to hell, along with the Protestants. Greek Orthodox and all the Orthodox ones weren't though. There was one huge one and one small one near us. We went to the huge one first and he went and found the priest and introduced himself and asked if we could look around. He was happy to see us and let us and I don't know if he knew who Father was or not because he was really nice and they talked shop and Father took us all around and explained to us what this or that was and how it differed and the priest took him back to some of the areas only priests can go to. Then we went to the other one. We went and saw the Vulcan, the big statue "The Storyteller" in Five Points with Father said was a Pagan idol because a goat was reading to other animals, but most of the Baptists said that too, so I was used to that. We went and did lots of things. We had a great weekend and he said Mass on Sunday morning in my livingroom and some of my oldest son's friends came over to it. They were Protestants but Father didn't mind, as long as they didn't take communion. He preached a little longer than the usual short homily because there were protestants there who were used to longer sermons and he made it geared toward my kids. He preached about how the best thing you can do in this life is something for someone else. Not what I expected at all.

Anyway, we were friends till he died and exchanged lots of gifts and things. He brought my mother back to the church and she had been away since her divorce from my father in 1965. Nobody talked about the abortion doctor thing anymore. By then it was his health that was the topic, but he was still insisting on calling to check on us and sending us things he found that he thought we were interested in. I'd send him the shirts he liked that he had a hard time finding (he rarely wore the collar, just polo type grandpa shirts) and I'd check with the two other friends he had which lived locally near him. We didn't talk much near the end, and I never fixed him and he died with the wrong views but I honestly don't think any of them were fueled by hate. He honest to God thought that while it would be mean on this earth to be that way, that God wanted it that way so he couldn't change God and had to follow him no matter what. Almost delusional you could say, but never hateful. I've seen every side there is of that man and there was no hate there at all. Just extreme wrongness. Right intentions doesn't fix wrongness.

Anyway, Father took me to those churches and sent me a couple videos of different services as well, but I've never been to one of their services. So that's how I saw the Greek Orthodox churches with one of the most hated men in America.