My Life as a Collecting Virgin

I obviously have way too much time on my hands today, but here goes my third post in about as many hours. The start of baseball season has once again piqued my interest in both collecting and the game itself. To start out, I was just remembering my first experience with card collecting. It was I'd say August '98, I was a chubby, cherubic ten year old at a neighbors birthday party, and as party favors, I received 3 packs of '98 Topps. I pulled Barry Larkin and Chris Stynes, and a love affair began. I started buying packs here and there, and in these days of naive youth, I have to admit I even bought a few of those random cards packaged in unopenable plastic that you kind find in the checkout aisles of Wal-Mart (don't judge, I pulled an A-Rod electric diamond rookie in one of those bastards). My TTM obsession began a few months later, with the help of the internet. Joe Boever popped my TTM collection cherry, with a crisply signed 1990 Donruss. I got his address from an internet white pages. I began in full force in 2000, and my collection exploded. The majority of my successes are still from this between 00-01. However, I had a very rough 2002 Spring Training, got a bit disillusioned, and took a break from collecting, TTM and otherwise, for about 3 years. I started collecting again with a vengeance during my Christmas break of 2005. I found a great trading site, thebenchtrading.com, and it really kickstarted my interest again. My requests have tailed off significantly of late, as I'm away at college, but seeing I'm coming home for good this summer, I can't foresee any reason why I can't retake my position among the collecting elite. Not that I've ever been in the collecting elite, or ever will be, but that sounded cool in my head