I’m down with OCD, yeah you know me

October 30, 2006

Maybe it’s the depression, threatening to capsize my little lifeboat as it roars and swells in angry waves.

Maybe it’s the stress, recently reaching near-record levels and jeopardizing the precarious state of my anxious mind.

Whatever the cause, the effects are cropping up in some rather unconventional ways.

You remember I told you about my odd need for physical even-ness? (If you’re just tuning in, please see #90 on my 140 Things About Me page. As if that weren’t idiosyncratic enough in and of itself, I’ve recently developed a few other peculiarities…

I am, apparently, physically incapable of taking the top cup off of a stack of disposable cups. Each workday morning, I arrive at the office and get a cup of coffee. I reach for a styrofoam cup, and…

I pick up at least four or five cups off the top of the stack, so that I can take a cup from the middle. I do this at fast-food joints and convenience stores, too. I think it stems from being neurotically worried about putting my mouth on a cup someone else has touched. Because I know that not everyone washes their hands as obsessively as I do. Which brings me to the next manifestation of my mental meltdown…

I am constantly aware of everything I touch, who might have touched it before me, and what germs I might be unknowingly acquiring. So I wash my hands eleventy thousand times a day, until they’re dry and chapped and raw. (But hey, I don’t use a new bar of soap for each hand-washing, like Jack Nicholson’s OCD character in As Good As It Gets. I’m not that bad … … yet.)

I think I had more to post about, but as I was perusing that IMDB link (that movie’s one of my favorites), I came across this quote:

Sell crazy someplace else, we’re all stocked up here.

And on that note, I think I’ll go curl up in the corner and cry.