Minor OCD quirks you have

In My Humble Opinion
61

I took the quiz at the Monk website. I’m “somewhat Monkish.” My house is dusty and cluttered, and my truck is grubby. However…

In my chest-high tool chest, I can tell you which drawer most of the tools are in.

I can eat a bite of this, then a bite of that, but I’m careful not to get too far ahead on one item or another.

I hate to leave the house unless I have a list, a hat, sunglasses, and something to read if I have to wait somewhere.

When I get a beer out of the refrigerator, I put a warm one in.

When I wash kitchen knives, I usually check a light’s reflection on the blade edge. If there’s a bright (dull) spot, I touch it up with a diamond rod.

During the baseball season, if I wear a Cardinals cap, I check the schedule to see whether to wear a home cap (red) or an away cap (blue.) I don’t have a Sunday cap (the bird instead of StL.)

In every room of my house, I can see a clock. This doesn’t mean I’m never late, but I know how late I’ll be.

62

You just reminded me - when the TV volume is expressed as a numerical form (vs just a bar on the screen) it has to be set at a multiple of 5. I don’t care what it is - 10, 15, 25, 55 - It just has to be a multiple of five otherwise I get unhappy.

63

I said this aloud, and wondered. Are you discussing something that involves latex gloves, and/or turning one’s head to the side while uttering the words?

64

Well, I was not sure exactly how it works, and what it is made for, but here is what I found on Wikipedia :

“In French, Italian, Romanian and Spanish, the word a patient is usually asked to say when a doctor is listening to his or her lungs with a stethoscope (Trente-Trois, Trentatrè, Treizeci şi trei, and Treinta y Tres)”

(not all doctors do that, actually)

65

I’m not sure it’s from French culture, because no other person in my family does it …

66

I’m not alone!! :smiley: I’m SO glad I found someone who went through this too. My family thought I was always nuts for doing this. I just couldn’t stop until I was around 15-16 too. To me, it felt like there was an invisible rope around me, and if I didn’t “straighten” it out, I’d be tangled somehow.

I don’t do that anymore, but now I have a new thing. I feel like I have to cross the same amount of lines with each leg. Like when you walk and there are lines in the concrete, each leg has to cross the same amount of lines. I don’t count this carefully, but I weigh in my head around how many of those individual lines and how many of the ‘block’ lines (the 10+ lines surrounding the ramp area of each corner of each sidewalk) I crossed with each leg. I don’t want them to be uneven I guess.

67

I’m not certain that mine aren’t a bit more than what was intended, but I’ll share anyway.

Whenever I am upset, or sometimes if I can’t think of a word, I sort of scratch the back of me head. I’m not really scratching it, exactly: my reach back and lightly touch the back of my head with the tips of my fingers and just sort of shake my hands. I have very short hair (clipped) and i’m not actually touching my skin with my fingernails. I don’t do this as often now that I’m on the right meds, but it still happens I no longer have uncontrolable shaking (other than as described above)unless I am extremely upset, or sometimes when I am physically ill, in which case my entire body will sometimes shake.

I on ocassion find myself saying (generally under my breath, unless I am alone) “Make it go away” I’m often not sure why.

on to more tradional ones:

If I’m at a restaruant that has hanging lamps over the table, I have to touch the lamp an set it to moving somewhat, at some point. This isn’t really a compulsion, more something I just do… sort of like if I am at longhorn I have to take the bread the bring out that has the knife stuck in it and, lifting it by the knife, lightly hit the wooden tray they bring it on as if it where a gavel. My friends call it the “breadhammer.”

68

When I put on shoes and socks, the right sock goes on first, but then the left shoe goes on before the right.

I fear I will walk funny all day if I change this routine.

69

All of my stuff has to be in proper alignment. The desk blotter must line up with the edge of the desk! Things must be straight! Forks, spoons, and knives must be parallel parked on the napkin!

I once had a cleaning service come in to clean my apartment before a party, and she didn’t put stuff back in proper alignment when she dusted. :mad: No more cleaning services for me!

I must rinse the suds off my hands after I shampoo my hair. Before I rinse my hair! I can’t stand suds!!!

I have to sit where I can see the door.

I have to sleep on the side of the bed closest to the door. Whichever side that is, left or right, doesn’t matter. :rolleyes: I’m a weirdo.

70

I write down what I wear on each day that I am teaching college classes…because I don’t want to repeat an outfit too soon. Of course, I realize that the students probably don’t notice, care or even remember what I’ve worn, but I do it anyway.

71

I’m another person who has to shop by threes - I have to have a multiple of three items in my trolley, a carton of 24 Cokes count as 1 item…

Also, with shopping, I have to make sure the contents of my shopping trolley are predominently blue. If I buy meat, it has to be either wrapped in paper, or if it is vacu-packed it has to be face down in the trolley because meat is red and I don’t like to see too much red. If I get a letter from, say, an insurance company which I have to keep, and they have a red corporate logo, I get a little bottle of liqiud paper and paint over the logo - and then go looking for a new insurer. I won’t eat red Smarties (Australian M&M’s)

I support South Sydney and can’t stand their jerseys! (RED & Green)

I hate straight lines and never draw them wherever possible. This resulted in me getting a grade of 2% for 8th grade technical drawing.

I am terrified of lightbulbs and will sit in the dark and wait for someone to come over rather than change one.

I do the little key (or mobile phone) patting dance everytime I leave a room.

I can only ever own a divisible by three number of ties or boxer shorts. And NO RED ONES!

If I write a letter it has to have a number of pages divisible by 3

I take all the doorsof cupboards in my house because I can’t stand having to open a door to look for something - I have to see it in front of me or it doesn’t exist.
mm

72

oh, and I have to sleep on the darkest side of the room

the bed must run East - west. If I’m in a hotel and it doesnt I strip the bed down and make up onthe floor to sleep east-west

and I cannot sleep in a bed where the covers have been tucked in. I have to pull them all out. Of all the things, this drives mambowoman craziest.

mm

73

I have many small quirks, much like everyone else posting here. The one main OCD-ness behavior is the fact that every time I walk through the Davis square subway station (just outside Boston), there is one tile on the wall I MUST touch, even if I enter the station on the farther side.

The tile is a small picture of a fish being chased by a larger fish, presumably to perform an act of destructive consumption. I touch it in memory of my buddy Samson the fish that ‘passed’ over a year ago.

74

I’m glad other people have experienced the “untangling” phenomenon.

Most of my OCD behavior was from my childhood.

Let’s see here:

If I was riding in the car and could see the dashed lines in the road, I had to mentally weave in and out of each one. I’d work myself into a frenzy with my eyes, sewing some huge invisible thread in between each dash.

If I did something that in my mind seemed to “favor” one side of my body, I had to repeat the motion with the other side so they didn’t get jealous of eachother. Like if I bumped my hand accidentally hard, I would have to “trick” the other hand by hitting it slightly so it wouldn’t feel bad. Or something.

This is partially responsible for my semi-ambidexterity. Same the “tangled” feeling.

I would periodically choose one obscure word and have to say it every day, and if I forgot to do it say, for a month, I would shut myself into a dark bathroom and repeat the same word 30 times.

I will visually divide large quantities of any object into 3’s, 4’s, or 5’s, whichever is more visually pleasing. Which is perfect for counting pills at work, as I use 5’s to group them. And although they are divided into 5’s, they are not “5”, they are 1. If I am counting to 30, I count 5’s to 6.

All of my clocks have to be exactly synchronized, doubly so if they are digital. I once had 4 digital clocks in my room set so closely together that your eyes could not dart across the room fast enough to see the numbers change. Between any of the 4. :smiley:

I went through a phase where I moved the furniture in my room until it felt right. I don’t know how or when I acheived it, or maybe I just got tired of lugging solid-oak furniture around the room every weekend.

All the books on my bookshelf must be arranged by height or the amount they stick out of the shelf, it’s hell to figure out if I should organize from tallest to smallest or deepest to shallowest because some tall books are shallow and some deep books are quite short. On top of that they have to be arranged in order of genre, i.e. they have to flow into one another. Vampire books, medical books, psychology, languages, translating dictionaries, history.
See?
Makes sense to me.
So take the genre-organizing in addition to the size organizing, and it is a wonder that I have a workable bookshelf.

If I am packing something, it has to be the most tetris-tight packed box possible. I have the ability to move in just a few strategically packed boxes, and those boxes are all impossibly heavy. If I see empty space I will find things, things that don’t need to be packed, like wadded-up tissue or paper towels and shove them in there.

I know there are more. I’ll come back when I realize them.

-foxy

75

You people are nuts with your counting and such.

But then I can’t stand it when there is liquid of any kind on the kitchen counter and anything, like a pot or bowl, is set on it.