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To the casual nearly-4-year-old observer, innocent of cause, effect, marketing and compulsion, Etsy is a game that begs to be played.  Also, it’s a game at which I excel, or so the theory goes – I must be good at it, since I am so readily enthralled, moving only to click a colorful square, and then click again, taking up extended periods of time that would otherwise be devoted to story-reading, magazine-making, or pretending to be a character from Winnie the Pooh (usually Kanga).

Luckily the passage of time is still an abstract concept, even with the influence of Montessori at work, which means it’s possible for an aunt to expand time, or contract it – bend it to her will, if you will. So help me, I will, if it means having time for all of the above, especially where said niece is concerned.

Even with my temporal awareness and supposedly fully-functional frontal lobe, I’ve yet to pinpoint what it is about Etsy that sucks me in so completely. It would be frightening to cede that much of my attention and will to do other things, that is if it wasn’t so fun. There is so much to see, and think about making or buying to have in my life or give to other people. Maybe I just like seeing what people can do, and how they do it, and go about offering it up for sale if they so choose.

Until the age of 10 I was convinced that I would grow up to be a nun, like Mother Teresa. Certainly not like our bewigged and constantly wigging-out principal, the only actual nun I’ve ever interacted with in person.

My turning away from a pious convent life did not occur due to my getting wise to the more nefarious doings and insidiously-heinous beliefs of MT – that enlightenment only happened recently, maybe just to me but I’d like to think I wasn’t the only one hoodwinked for so long.

Throughout years of my youth when most of my statistical cohort had mad crushes on and sleeping bags featuring members of the NKOTB, I reveled in the romance of my imagined religious calling.

At various junctures I soulfully committed my future self to being the garden-tending nun whose tomatoes would win prizes if she ever were to seek such worldly glory (pride is a sin, so no), the healer sister with an herbal remedy for every ailment, and the conflicted young novitiate who wrestled mightily within her soul over her vow of chastity when faced with a dashing young priest with demons of his own to battle – somewhere in there I must’ve been exposed to the Thorn Birds.

I read a lot, and dreamed of my fresh-pressed habit, my crisp starched wimple, and my polished rosewood rosary beads. This detailed focus on accessories should have been my first clue that all was not as it seemed when it came to my passion for Christ.

It took one big deal of an infatuation to snap me out of my fixation on being a nun – it was necessary to fight fire with fire, so to speak. What lies at the root of both these and every successive obsession of mine is the same impractical, romance-seeking, deeply nerdy drive to figure out what it takes to be me in ways that just enough of the intended other people in the world notice and appreciate.

A former coworker of mine liked to say (and probably still does, I’m just not there to hear it) that people really just want to feel important. And maybe it is just status, or power, or control – after all I am just another human – but at the heart of it I know that I’m a long way from having this whole living of life thing figured out, and looking at how other people have made their way in the world, or are trying to, is an inspiration, a comfort, and a reminder of ever-present possibilities.