Just goes to show that there’s a little OCD in all of us… now somebody explain why we medicate the hell out of people who admit to these quirks?
I can’t think unless there’s a song ‘playing’ in my head. Even when I don’t remember all the words, it’s there, note for note. For this reason I can’t really go to live concerts – any tiny discrepancy between the live version and the one in my head is unbearable. For some reason, on days like today, it almost seems like I predict the songs I’m going to hear (in grocery stores, in bookstores, etc) the rest of the day. I’ll be humming them under my breath as I approach the place, from blocks away, and step inside just as the song is starting up. Being a die-hard skeptic, this gets unsettling.
I can’t remember numbers unless they’re all in one stretch. For some reason, all the numbers associated with me have lots of sevens in them 79708180, 72497542, 46513778, 374912, and of course 713785977… and a few other numbers associated with me that I don’t quite trust you lot with, all of which contain two or more sevens. The one exception that I can think of is 4334958, I suppose, but even then it has a ‘43’ and a ‘34’…
I never remember them with hyphens of any kind. I always have to go back and add the hyphens and parentheses and whatnot.
I have a bad memory, but once something’s in there, it’s there for life and will pop out again at inopportune times. One day during a particulary dull discussion group, I found myself silently reciting one number over and over and over to myself. It wasn’t until several days later when it dawned on me that it was an old ICQ number that I haven’t used in years.
While I’m reading something on the computer, I’ll always, always be clicking and hilighting random patches of the text as I read. Sometimes only a single word, sometimes a line or two, never more than a paragraph or so. Sometimes I make a game of it and try to hilight just the space between two words, which for some reason the computer doesn’t like and tries to ‘fix’ automatically.
I do the elaborate scenes before bed, but I guess the difference is that I have an accomplice. She’s somewhere near Vancouver, I’m out here in Boston, and we’ve never met – behold the power of the internet. But almost every night for two years, now, we’ve been instant-messaging paragraphs of our little stories back and forth, sometimes six or eight hours at a stretch. We rarely talk about real-life things, at least until recently. Whenever one story gets old, we start a fresh one, sometimes with the same characters in a different setting. It’s gotten to a point where we try to warn each other of impending absences weeks in advance. I think we need lives.
Whenever I see a reasonably large container, say ice-box or bigger, I try to figure out how much of myself (or, if it’s very large, of my stuff) I could fit into it. Comes from living in a closet, I guess (but it’s a big closet).
I’m irrationally paranoid about someone looking at or touching any of my stuff when I’m not around. I’m one of those people that doesn’t really have anything to hide, but makes darn sure to hide it anyway.
Elaborate finger-taps, yes. We used to have a pair of eclectus parrots that would do some very elaborate foot-taps when they were bored, which was most of the time. Considering they had four (front) toes each, they did rather well. Sometimes I try to remember and imitate some of their patterns.
I constantly narrate in my head as if I were going to tell someone about it later. I almost never do. You can imagine what an impact the world of web journals made on my life. (Now I waste even more time by actually sitting down to type it out to a bored but willing audience. I’m trying to break the habit – clean three weeks and counting, baby.)
And I do the ‘edit, undo’ thing, too. At least, I catch myself thinking it and wish I really could. Instead, I settle for constantly berating myself, under my breath when I’m alone, silently when I’m not. I can only stop when I find something new to be angry at myself for.
No car runners or bouncing balls, but… never, ever hand me a stack of shuffled cards. It isn’t pretty. As someone I know put it once, “My brain loves this stuff. Numbers! Line 'em up!” A computer science class proved disastrous – now I have to see how many iterations it would take “bubble sort” to put any number into a proper ascending order.
My dad spins things. He has a nut and bolt that have been with him for years, all over the world, and he gets anxious when he can’t find it. He also has a certain mechanical pencil tip that, when unscrewed, has a spin that actually accelerates briefly after a few seconds. It gets up to a really good speed on those conference tables with the smooth-as-wet-glass surfaces.
