I have come to accept that I can be somewhat obsessive. I would have never realized this except for the symptoms pointed by by a dear old friend (see point #1). Now I see it everywhere, particularly evidenced by the triviality of the things I enthusiastically grasp onto.

The most recent obsession I see creeping up? Video advertising. It started with looking at those darn wedding planner websites. Every time you click on a page an advertisement floats down and opens up right over the article you are trying to read. I close it. I click to the next page, the same ad floats down. I click back to the home page. Same ad…After two trails with this one particular site and 50 clicks to shoo away some product I didn’t want, I became so incensed I emailed an irritated letter to the website feedback and never used them again (as promised). The one wedding website I occasionally use does something different. There is a box in the right hand margin which plays videos of wedding dress fashion shows or ads for registry services. It always starts automatically. You can click on the “stop” button, but this only works for about 4 minutes, then it over-rides your explicit instruction and plays again. Same for the mute button. So now I just have to mute my computer and ignore the movement. I find this indescribably annoying (although preferable to the ad that flops down over what you’re reading like a lonely cat). Suddenly, a number of my favorite websites/blogs have these video ads running. These things have the added irritant of the fact that they surely eat my bandwidth.

I won’t even get into the obscene amount of commercials on American TV, more noticeable now that I’ve grown accostomed to shows that are only interrupted on specific and limited ad breaks. But these internet ads are really making me cranky. Apparently advertisers are giving up on wooing the customer and going for bashing their faces in with their desperation to have you give them your money. But it’s just plain stupidity when advertising gets so obnoxious and insistant that you want nothing more than to dance gleefully over an oil barrel full of the product on fire. Don’t they do market research on this stuff? I got your focus group right here!