Oh you won’t believe this. Oh you’re gonna hate me.

I’m getting paid to Pinterest. Paid. To do something I was doing compulsively for fun anyway. Sometimes I still just sit back and cackle because it just shouldn’t be. Paid to Pinterest.

If you don’t Pinterest you probably think it sounds astonishingly boring and pointless. My friend Marlene won’t get an account because, “It’d just be another pet I had to feed,” along with her writing and ranch and kids and teaching. She’s sort of right. It is a pet.  It’s a lot of things.

Pinterest is….a magazine that you hand-tailor to your own tastes. You like funny-mom stuff, vegan food, and Ancient Egypt? Bang bang bang…archaic Egyptian recipes for vegan baby food shows up on your computer. Oh, no, that’s a lie. It doesn’t usually. It might! If such a thing exists it will eventually.

Pinterest, to me though, is a museum. A museum where you have a room to explore everything on EARTH you find enthralling. My personal Pinterest (in which the artifacts are gathering dust) has boards for my religious confusion, pre-19th centuries domestic details, and fat people. And like 50 other subjects. Granted most people are more interested in home decor and pictures of travel destinations at sunset, but that’s ok. It’s YOUR museum. Your little shop. Your curio cabinet, your library, and your battered file folder of clippings about how remove stains and ease cramps which might be total malarkey but hey it might come in handy.

I curate the Pinterest for Mental Floss now. My editor was baffled by the good story ideas I kept coming up with using my pinterest boards (Medical Equipment You’re Glad Isn’t Used Anymore and so forth). He didn’t know what a Pinterest was, and told me to go use it to make people want to read Mental Floss.

It’s not quite my own voice. I sit down of the computer and lay my thick heavy-rimmed Buddy Holly glasses of funny/hipster/smart/weird over my eyes. This blocks my own personal Pinterest vision, which is similar, but no Star Wars and lots more naked people and post-mortem photography. But I’m willing to make the sacrifice.