I used to be a compulsive instant-opener. It’s a trait that no doubt carried over from childhood. Get a toy…open a toy. It seems so natural. It’s a habit that persisted up until very recently, but now that I’ve altered my habits, it has resulted in an interesting side effect: the backlog.
Once upon a time I did the same thing with comics. When I’d get a new batch of comics either from my local comic shop or, before that, the mini-mart, I’d come home and read through them right away, regardless of how long it took me. But I stopped that habit a long long time ago, reading maybe an issue or two when I came home, and then reading others throughout the week.
I don’t get weekly comics anymore having shifted to trades and hardcover collections. Boy, the backlog there is extensive, but that’s an entirely different article.
At one point I would grab an entire wave and open them all as soon as possible. I’ll never forget that time I got two entire waves of Marvel Legends along with every Face Off Two-Pack after striking gold at one particular Wal-Mart. I opened them all in one long spree of flying plastic. It was an exhausting process, cracking into those bomb-proof ML packages and untwisting about a thousand of those nightmarish twist-tie nooses. My fingers were sore when I was done.
At some point in the decade-plus since then, it never occurred to me to slow down. With each new shipment or wave or gluttonous engorgement of new toys, I’d open all of them in a furious flurry.
Until very recently. At some point I realized I actually enjoyed the figures more if I took my time. What was my hurry? I had trained myself to open open open in order to reduce the clutter of unopened packages. I had trained myself to be impatient. But in doing so–in opening entire waves of figures and burying myself in toys—I realized I was not enjoying the single toys as much as I should. I was enjoying them in clusters, and not enjoying them as individual pieces. The only thing that would make me slow down and linger was if I had to do a review on them for Fwoosh. But if I wasn’t reviewing a toy, I’d speed through a bunch, linger with a few, and they’d get lost.
I stopped doing that in 2019, and it’s made a difference in how I appreciate toys. Even if I just open one a night, or one every couple of days, it’s made a difference. By not speed-opening my way through groups of them, it lessens that internal desire for the “opener’s high” that you get when you open a toy. Hey, that felt good, open another. And another. Is it the opening that’s supposed to be important, or the toy itself? At some point the endorphin rush can get mixed up. Moving on to the newest thing, leaving behind that thing you just opened.
Of course, this alteration in my habits has resulted in having a backlog of toys for the first time in my life. I have toys…sitting around…just sitting there…still in their packages. This is new. I know there are many people with huge vats of unopened toys—the “fat closet stacks” of myth—but this is a new thing for me.
It does something. What it does, is turn every day into…almost a potential Christmas. Every day, even if I know exactly what toys I have, and what I haven’t opened, there’s a potential for opening a new toy. And as I am one of those peculiar beings known as a toy collector, having this backlog means that I don’t have to leave the house in order to get that rush of a new toy.
There are some drawbacks to this. Having a backlog means that you tend to prioritize, or you put off opening something until you’re in the mood. Right now I have three Gremlins figures waiting for me to be in the mood to open them. I have a handful of Star Wars. I still have a few import figures waiting around. Sometimes the newest toy—bright and shiny as it is—takes precedence over something that’s been sitting around for months, which means an unopened toy ends up hanging around like the Charlie in a box on the Island of Misfit toys. But they’re not misfits, they’re just unopened.
I will get around to opening them all, but I know that it will be time to ship yet another pile of loot from BBTS, or another month of import figures will be ready to ship, and the backlog will remain in one form or the other. Even if it dwindles, the nonstop deluge of toys that we seem to be existing under means that it always exists in the ambient state of perpetual replenishment.
Christmas comes once a year. Unless you have a backlog. Then it could come every day. There are worse things.
