I spent six hours yesterday arranging nuts, bold, screws and hardware. SIX HOURS. I thought I had a plan. I got distracted. Before I knew it, I had bolts in the little slide tray organizer AND in my RolyKit.
I thought I was making such progress. Now I feel as though I have to go and undo all of that organizing and make it be even MORE organized. Perhaps small white labels on each and every bin and edge of the RolyKit sections will ameliorate my feelings of organizational inadequacy.
I did this for practical reasons, my garage is going to be turned into a family room and I will lose a lot of messy storage space. Hence the need to organize and regroup.
I wish I was my son. The boy is 12, almost 13. His dresser drawers and desk is IMMACULATE. Even as a toddler he arranged all of his toys before him in a careful arc. Pleasing to the eye and well organized. Perhaps I should pay the Man-Cub to do the garage work FOR me?
oooh, your son is going to be such a favorite with the ladies. Put some of his genes into a vial for me, and send 'em over so I can inject them into my typical slob man.
I sympathize, Cartooniverse. I have a close friend with obssessive compulsive disorder. Her meds pretty much keep her from making other people crazy, but seem to have a limited effect on her ability to stop cleaning and organizing everything in sight. I envy her, some days, for while my house is generally CLEAN, it is not often tidy and organized.
Wouldn’t it be neat if we could schedule that kind of weirdness for ourselves one day a week?
I wish that I could bottle that “nesting instinct” that pregnant women get. Not only was I cleaning and tidying in my pregnancy, but I was ENJOYING it. A little of it would go a LONG way. What’s more, we could give it to our partners, too.
And Cartooniverse, yeah, enlist your son. I’m sure that he’d LOVE to do this.
And the title of this thread should be either, “I wish I were anal-retentive” or “I wish I were obssessive compulsive.” Subjunctive case should be used, because you are not what you are wishing you were.
The thing about being obsessive-compulsive is that it doesn’t affect all aspects of your life, it’s kind of hit and miss. For instance, I spend a lot of time folding my clothes just so. Socks, t-shirts, underwear, the lot. Arrange my paperback books alphabetically. Even make sure that all the bills in my wallet are right-side up and facing front, denominations front to back in order. But there are currently several empty cardboard boxes that have been littering my kitchen for days now and I don’t care enough to do anything about it. It’s a little weird.
I’m a frustrated Felix living with a cuter version of Oscar. I enjoy alphabetically organized CD’s and movies by genre, a place for everything, and symmetry. However, my wife is the devil and more efficient at making messes than I am at cleaning up so all I can do is constantly memorize every single thing in the house every day so I’ll know where to find it tomorrow. I’m being oppressed by the woMAN.
Make the kid do it. Make it a challenge, sort of a “I’ll bet you 5 bucks you can’t organize this stuff and label it correctly” thing. My dad used to do that with me. It was win-win. I made money and could find his tools and parts when I wanted them:)
Eh, my kid’s diagnosed as severe obsessive-compulsive and he is a completely untidy little chaos producer. I just wish he’d direct some of the handwashing energy into bedroom tidying energy
Prima, I’m sorry you’ve got it so rough. I surely didn’t mean to equate my thoughts with any kind of slam or shot at people who have to live with someone who suffers terribly as a result of this kind of debilitating disorder.
Attempts to equate neat, organized (ahem, CORRECT) people with OCD and whathaveyou is a lighthearted figure of speech. Like calling someone a soup Nazi.
Meanwhile, calling someone who forces you to constantly memorize every single thing in the house every day so you’ll know where to find it tomorrow “the Devil” is merely accurate.
I would like to point out that in my previous post, I did say my friend has OCD, and I was being accurate. I don’t generally worry about being exactly, precisely, perfectly accurate in speech, but I don’t go around calling people “retards” or “anal-compulsives” or “schizos” - that’s just mean and hurtful. If I’m being light-hearted, I will usually fall back on the all-purpose term “weirdo.”
I know how difficult it was for my friend to get some measure of control over her OCD, and how her family has had to cope with both the positive and negative effects of her disorder. Having dealt with some specific mental health issues in my own family, I would never “make light” of a serious mental health condition. That said, I still wish I could schedule the particularly beneficial aspects of my friend’s disorder once a week, just to get my house tidied up!
Despite the above cite, it really should be “anal retentive”, not “anal compulsive”. The two basic categories are; Anal retentive, and anal expulsive. For some reason, “anal retentive” caught the public’s attention as a term to a far greater extent than anal expulsive, and got used a lot, then got shortened to just “anal”. It soon got identified with compusive behavior, and the term “anal compulsive” got coined.
But to purists, i.e. the anal rententive types, it should really be “anal retentive” to describe the behavior you desire.
