I’ve had my fair share of violent obsessions. Yes, violent. I say violent because they are typically immediate and drastic and full-blown in a short amount of time – picture me throwing myself at full force into a wall and that’s basically what I mean. Some last a few hours (apologies to my neglected ukulele), and some last years (shout out to you, Greg Holden).

 

I’m not sure exactly what this says about me as a person, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t explain that these obsessions – great and small – are a fundamental piece of who I am as a person. At my core are things that I drastically love or drastically hate. Polar. These things are ever-changing.

 

So that leads me to here. The obsession I’m really here to talk about:

 

David Sedaris. He isn’t necessarily my most recent obsession, but he’s dug himself into a corner of my heart and my brain and I haven’t been able to shake him out of there since I read Me Talk Pretty One Day at the beginning of last year. I made a new year’s resolution to read more – I set a goal for one book a month. I read Sedaris’s book in two weeks. I didn’t read another book until August. Whoops. Let’s not get into my lack of follow-through on goals. This is a judgment-free zone, okay? Scratch that. Judge all you want. See if I care.

 

Sedaris stuck. I don’t know exactly why. Well, maybe I do. His words resonated with me. The way he was self-deprecating whilst being quietly cocky. The way he made fun of the people around him and made mundane situations into a story worth telling. I was hooked. He made me laugh out loud, and that isn’t something I take lightly.

 

There are things that make me feel connected to Sedaris. I mean that in the least creepy way possible. I realize that he is a 61-year-old gay man and a famous humourist, while I am a mere irrelevant 21-year-old senior in college who lives on Twitter. Oh, spare me. A 21-year-old college student feeling small? Never heard that one before. But I mean it – there are things that make me feel tied to him.

 

Have you ever felt compelled to write something? Not because you want to – in fact, you may even feel like it’s the last thing you want to write about. But you feel like you have to. This indomitable draw. Like maybe it’s just a little too weird to ignore. Well that’s how I got here.