OK here we go. A true confession from the very depths of my heart. Some of you know this but (deep breath, eyes welling up): My name is Lucy and I'm.. I'm a bit OCD. God, I said it! Damn that feels good. Thank you, (sob) thank you, I couldn't have faced it without you guys.. I'm accepting this 10-day chip not just for me, but for everyone whose name contains exactly 10 letters or any multiple of 5...
Now the tragic thing about OCD, or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder as you rookies out there may know it, is that everyone has it. EVERYONE. ALL OF YOU. It may manifest itself in something as seemingly innocent as alphabetising your CD collection ("Well, it makes it easier to find Chris de Burgh! Now is he D or B??") or feeling unaccountably cross when "your" traffic light isn't green when it usually is at 7.07 am as you drive past, or perhaps over-zealous handwashing and hating raw bacon to a point approaching psychopathy (you know who you are) - or your tics may be less obvious, and I admit here to being unable to watch subtitled films without counting the letters in the subtitles on my fingers and having to add them up to a multiple of 5, to the extent of cheating and adding in an extra "oui" or "da" to achieve the right total. I often sit on my hands to stop people noticing. My worst one is any film that has windows permanently in the background, where I have to draw the rectangles over and over again until I've drawn every one from every corner in turn, and then ALL OVER AGAIN in the opposite direction. As you read this and shake your heads nervously, I urge you, nay, implore you, to examine yourselves. Do you have to rush back to check you've locked the front door, not just once but several times, not just once in a while but EVERY time you leave the house? Do you adjust pictures that are hanging at an angle? It's all OCD, my friend, and we all have it. The autism spectrum is a wide-ranging and all-encompassing one, and while at the far end you have Rainman, at this end here you have the rest of us. Embrace your inner weirdo! Get slightly grumpy that your other half puts the knives the wrong way up in the dishwasher BECAUSE IT'S JUST BLOODY WRONG!!! And I can't tell you what an effort it was not to go back and count all the letters in this blog. Do punctuation marks count?
2 comments:
Hmm. Always known I've got a fair hunk of this. Like knowing how many panes of glass there are in the door of No.10. After a very boring sermon my sister once said, "Bet you don't know how many panes of glass there were". "Eight windows, 76 panes in each.." I was able to reply instantly(never having been any good at maths)...
It's hereditary I think - my mother used to play little tunes on her fingers when she was holding my hand to cross the road. I don't think she knew she was doing it, it was like humming. And recently I've started fixating on lapels (??!!!) - Prozac time I think. Could be worse, could be Tourette's...
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