Thursday Morning Confession

Hey, have any of you that have Site Meter checked out the World Map locator thingy? That's really cool. Especially cool for me because I have a fascination with maps. Seriously. I've told you guys before that I'm a dork. Here is more proof. I'm not really sure when I developed this map obsession, but I remember being quite young, maybe 7 or so, and spending hours after school staring at this gigantor map of Louisiana that took up an entire wall in the law office where my mom worked. I'm talking hours. Of course, there weren't many other options for after-school activities for seven-year-olds at a law office that specialized in handgun lawsuits. I mean, I guess I could've flipped through the Glock manuals or something. But I chose to stand in front of the map, studying the cities, the rivers, measuring the distance between my town and other towns I had heard of but never visited. The main man, the big bad lawyer, who I had called merely by his last name, Goff, since I was even younger than seven, would walk by sometimes and ask me what I was doing. Most of the time, though, he walked by, angry at something, and never noticed me there. I fed the fish sometimes, until they died. (Not my fault, by the way). At home, in my childhood room, the one that was painted pink and had a white bunny rabbit border around the top of the walls, I kept a big blue world globe. I inherited it from my older sister and the light bulb that was supposed to light it up always seemed to malfunction. Nevertheless, I loved that globe. Same thing as the map. Would study it for hours - during my FREE time. So naturally, by the time geography classes came around, my paper was the one everybody chose to cheat from. Except for the other Lauren who was busy telling stories about how, in WWII, her grandfather got hit by a piece of shrapnel and would have died had he not been wearing his helmet. Nowadays, I'm still just as fascinated with maps. I have four at my desk at work. I also quite enjoy Mapquest. So there, a little Thursday morning fetish confession for you.

Other things I am obsessed with, which are somewhat more normal than staring at maps:
Jackets
Jeans
Chocolate
Cheese
TBS Reruns, including Seinfeld, Friends, Sex and the City and Roseanne
Rick Steves on PBS
Jack Kerouac
Wallace Stevens
The Grateful Dead
Interpol
Fiji water
Square-shaped drinking glasses (perhaps why I like Fiji water?)