Night Owl Cards

In my last post, I touched on the futility of being a team collector, that no matter how hard you try, you're not going to be able to get every card that features your team. There are many reasons for this, the most daunting of which may be the 80 jillion sets that are issued every year. ("Variety" and "choice" can be a double-edged sword). But one of the other reasons is one that I hadn't considered all that seriously until last week. And that reason getting in the way of completing my team sets? It's me. I try very much to be a diligent collector. I catalog cards, I create want lists. I organize my cards every few months. I think I do a pretty good job. I've read several times about how folks have forgotten about packs they bought and discovered them months later. I could never figure out how someone could not know they had unopened cards in their possession. But then I had an epiphany last week. And I realized that my problem isn't that I f...

I was always a pretty good student in school. Even through the toughest math classes in high school, I'd end up with decent grades. I had one math teacher who was particularly demanding, particularly tough and liked to yell. Only the smartest of the smart made it through his classes unscathed. Unfortunately, I wasn't one of those unscathed. I would start out "scathed" and then build slowly through the year until I was kind of half-scathed or a quarter-scathed. My teacher recognized this, and he would do something that rattled me every time he said it. He would pass out the results of a particularly nonsensical math test, something that only the braniacs in the class could survive, and yell about the low grades he was handing out. Then he's give me my paper and he'd say, sort of so I was the only one who could hear: "Night Owl, you know better than that." (Yes, even then they called me "night owl." What? You don't believe me?) "You...