Neuroses
Last week my wife was teasing me about my sticker phobia. And my dirty dish phobia, if you could call it that (obsession with having the dishes clean, as opposed to phobia of touching the dirty dishes).
It prompted me to think, am I all that neurotic? So, as often happens, I was waiting for my carry-out order at a restaurant, and monkeying around with my Blackberry to pass the time, and started making a list (perhaps appropriately titled "OCD").
Here were the neuroses I came up with:
Whenever I get tea or coffee in a to-go cup, with one of those plastic lids, I compulsively align the mouth of the lid exactly opposite the seam in the paper cup. One bad coffee-on-the-chest experience with a poor seal between cup and lid caused by a bumpy lip seam turned this practice into a religious obsession. don't ask what happens when there's a seam, lid mouth, and teabag string in play. A protractor could be required.
I'm obsessive about throwing out any food which is either one minute past its due date (packages with ambiguous dates like 08-07-08 are a huge ranty blog post just waiting to happen), or leftovers or unpackaged vegetables whose age I can't specifically remember. If something in the fridge is actually moldy, neighbouring foods in the blast area are also subject to purging. This practice used to make the Starving Little Children in China™ cry, but at least now I've got guinea pigs, so they make sure the limp veggies don't go to waste. I've only had food poisoning once (from some spoiled cheese, around 1999), but it must have made quite an impression on me. Oddly, I still eat bleu cheese like there's no tomorrow.
I get all peevish and cranky about anything tacky or sticky in general, but especially stickers I'm required to pull off of things (for example, those "Security Device Enclosed" stickers on the edges of DVD and CD cases), and when stickers cross paths with food (like a sticker or tape which seals a muffin package or something) it nearly destroys my appetite. I have no idea why this is — if I knew, I guess it wouldn't exactly be a neurosis.
Lots of computer obsessiveness: Computer multitasking. I have this weird thing where I have to have at least three or so emails, documents, or other tasks in progress at the same time in order to be effective at any of them, and I have this weird tic where if I'm in a hurry to get to work in the morning, or to a meeting at work, I have to check my email really quickly before I can go. This gives me no end of stress if the email client is being slow to respond.
I get really freaky at poorly organized directory structures on shared filesystems, or when installation utilities force me to put apps in weird places on my own computer.
It also drives me absolutely batty when a document has mismatched fonts, font sizes, indenting, and text styles. Okay, I'll admit it, if a document's style registry has even one "Style (Latin) 14 pt (Complex) 16 pt (Latin) Bold Left Indent +15" entry, I pretty much flip out. Luckily most people don't notice this obsession of mine, but I do think they wonder who the style fairy is that shows up in the middle of the night and cleans up their shared documents.
My 12,000+ song iTunes music library is a veritable masterwork of proper capitalization, standardized artist and album names, complete album artwork, hierarchical genre classifications, and geography, source, and language comment tags. Granted, the tags and capitalization are always a work in progress, and the recent migration from PC to Mac set the album artwork back a few steps, but it'll be back in perfect shape soon.
I have this generic obsession with standardization and interchangeable parts. Once I find a brand or model of something I really like, I stick with it almost exclusively, until the company goes under, or some numbnut discontinues the product or something, in which case I go into prolonged depression until I can find a new standard. Examples include: writing pens
pants and jeans (I'm still really miffed that American Eagle started making intentional holes in their boot cut jeans — they were the only jeans that looked good on me, and now the holes make them no-longer-work-appropriate)
modular shelving (my living room shelves were discontinued — now I have to start all over with something new, rather than simply expanding)
socks (I hate hate hate having to go through laundry to match up individual socks with their partners)
Some personal grooming quirks: missed spots shaving, ingrown hairs, the occasional pimple, and long fingernails all drive me nuts. Once an offending entity is detected, I'm more or less unable to function until I can run to a washroom and fix it.
Desk clutter. I never thought my paperless and relatively clutter-free desk was that far outside the margins of average desk condition until some teammates kindheartedly teased me about it on Wednesday.
The notorious dishes. As much as I love to cook, I can't do it if there's even a single dish in the sink. As I'm cooking, I wash dishes, spatulas, pots, pans, cutting boards, and knives shortly after I'm done using them, as I cook and prepare other stuff. Emotionally it feels related to my spoiled food aversion, but it's such a visceral compulsion, it wouldn't be accurate to justify it via any rational explanations.
I think the dish compulsion is a love/hate scenario for my wife. As much as she hates my nagging if her own dishes are left in the sink for more than a few hours, I'm sure she loves the fact that there are almost never any dirty dishes to worry about after dinner (aside from the plates and silverware we just used), not to mention the fact that my dish compulsion usually drives me to do the vast majority of dishwashing before she even has a chance. She makes this up to me by doing more than the fair share of the vacuuming and laundry, both of which I despise.
* * *
So, given the whole list, the conclusion I reached for the "Am I really that neurotic?" question, is not only a resounding yes, but literally makes me wonder if there is indeed a clinical diagnosis lurking around in there. Granted, I'm functional enough despite all those things, and some of them are actually pretty adaptive (the coffee cup thing, the dishes, and my hyper-organization, except when it kills my creativity). Either way, what's almost as surprising to me about the length of the list is how well I've managed (I think) to hide them from myself and other people. Or have I?
It prompted me to think, am I all that neurotic? So, as often happens, I was waiting for my carry-out order at a restaurant, and monkeying around with my Blackberry to pass the time, and started making a list (perhaps appropriately titled "OCD").
Here were the neuroses I came up with:
I think the dish compulsion is a love/hate scenario for my wife. As much as she hates my nagging if her own dishes are left in the sink for more than a few hours, I'm sure she loves the fact that there are almost never any dirty dishes to worry about after dinner (aside from the plates and silverware we just used), not to mention the fact that my dish compulsion usually drives me to do the vast majority of dishwashing before she even has a chance. She makes this up to me by doing more than the fair share of the vacuuming and laundry, both of which I despise.
* * *
So, given the whole list, the conclusion I reached for the "Am I really that neurotic?" question, is not only a resounding yes, but literally makes me wonder if there is indeed a clinical diagnosis lurking around in there. Granted, I'm functional enough despite all those things, and some of them are actually pretty adaptive (the coffee cup thing, the dishes, and my hyper-organization, except when it kills my creativity). Either way, what's almost as surprising to me about the length of the list is how well I've managed (I think) to hide them from myself and other people. Or have I?