I’m a bit of a collector. There was never any reason for my collecting, I just did it. If I could get large amounts of something I would. My years of collecting have led me to get many things of varying levels of use, but no matter how useful having a large amount of something is, it is always just fun to have things.

My mother is also a collector of things. She started by collecting temporary tattoos that came with gum in Brazil when she was about 7. After that she started a key chain collection that we still have today, I would say that it is rather small compared to other collections in this house. When she moved to New York and met my dad they joined a CD club and started collecting CDs. I would say that this was the first big collection in my family. I included some in the image, but that is only about a tenth of the CDs we have in this house. I would say this is one of the more useful collections in my house because we can actually use these CDs unlike some of the things that I have collected. Most of the CDs reflect the different musical tastes of my parents. My dad has a lot of rock and roll from groups like the Rolling Stones and The Clash. My mother got some classical and Harpsichord CDs, but she also got some of my favorite CDs. When she left Brazil she took some Brazilian music with her and those are still my favorite songs.

Once me and my brother came around, the collecting only intensified in our house. My brother wasn’t that much of a collector but like many children he would fall under the spell of Pokemon. I, too, went through a card collecting phase. I would buy a small collection of Yu-Gi-Oh cards when Yu-Gi-Oh Zexal was showing. I can only imagine how much money was wasted on card games that we never played. Speaking of games we never played, we also got these small figures called GoGos. They supposedly could be used to play a game, but I don’t remember anything about the game I just like how the figures look. We also collect a bunch of shaped rubber bands, I forget the name and also lost all of them so I can’t say much about them. Me and my brother were also big Nintendo fans so we ended up having a lot of video game boxes lying around the house. I believe that we have the most games for the Wii but we also have a lot of games for the DS, 3DS, Wii U, and I have a small collection of Switch games. We also started collecting misspellings of our names, some of which I included in the picture.

My brother was never that big of a collector, but I on the other hand went a little crazy with it. The first thing that I remember collecting was fancy baseballs. Anywhere I went I would always try to get a baseball with a design. My favorite Baseball was one that I got at any Egypt museum in New York. The ball has a sarcophagus design and looks amazing. I also have a lot of figures that function with video games. I have a lot of Skylanders despite only have Skylanders Swap Force. Ninetdo also released a set of figures called Amiibo which were original made for a game called Super Smash Bros. for Wii U/3DS, so as a smasher I had to get some. My favorite Amiibo is definitely the box of Mario cereal. Most Amiibo are actual figures that look nice on a shelf, this one is a literal box of cereal that interacts with Nintendo games. I also got a collection of lanyards somehow. I don’t know how it happened but I just have them and that is all that matters to me. However I have one collection that rises above the rest.

My favorite and biggest collection is my pencil collection. This collection has destroyed two pencil bags and a big sandwich bag. It started in 6th grade when I started looking to the floor and finding pencils. I would pick them up and keep them and eventually it got to the point where I had a full pocket of pencils.  One day I needed a place to put my pencils and my gym teacher told me to get a bag, so I started using a pencil bag, which broke around 7th grade. I got another bag which broke in 8th grade and then got a sandwich bag as a quick replacement. To help me with this my friends put together a box made from the carcass of a Quaker oats box, and was topped with the zipper from my second pencil bag. It is in the image. This is perhaps the single most useful thing to be made in a design class and something I still treasure to this day. Despite all the heart put into this box it could not keep up with my pencil collecting habit and has reached its maximum capacity. Because of this, I had to turn an old shoe book into a second pencil box which is currently not very full, but one day it, too, will be overcome by my collecting.