Am I Enid? Transferrence in the world of collecting

What’s your most prized possession? Is it something that you keep with you all the time, or something that is locked away in a box in your closet that only sees the light of day when you really need it? Personally, mine is my DVD collection (319 and counting) that fits nicely into an oversized CD case, convenient for carting anywhere, as I brought it here to NZ from the United States. It’s important to me, not just because it’s cost me thousands of dollars to compile, but also there’s just something about having it, owning it, and showing it off that I really love. It’s organized by genre, but mostly in genres I’ve made up myself (i.e. disgruntled animals = Jurassic Park, Jaws, King Kong), and then by the design on the disk itself. Every now and then I take everything out and reorganize it, but that is a rare occasion when I’m incredibly out-of-my-mind bored. Sometimes I can flip through the whole thing and not find a single movie I want to watch, but simply find pleasure in looking at them all. Other times I can just flip directly to a certain page and fish out what I want to watch based on my mood. The point is, I feel like I have a similar relationship to my DVD’s that characters such as Enid in Ghost World and the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides have with their records. While reading the articles by Robertson-Wojcik and Stilwell I got the feeling I was reading about myself. Ironically enough, my best friend Casey has a larger DVD collection then me and we compete to push each other to buy more movies and then watch each others’. His collection is scattered, each DVD in its original case and spread out between his living room, bedroom and other people’s houses. But he has a record of each movie listed on his computer that he updates every time he makes a new purchase. I’m precise and organized and fuel my love of movies in my purchases that display all sides of my personality, where each film has a special meaning to me; Casey collects for sport, he buys in bulk and is happy with watching the same movie over and over again after he’s bought it until he gets sick of it and disregards it to the corner of his floor. Together, we are the perfect male and female real-life representations of the record collectors talked about in both articles and seen in numerous films.