Why I am not Marc Summers

[pseydtonne]

My roommate and I were watching the 1972 version of Solaris this evening. I liked seeing a messy space station because it made sense. My roommate pointed out that, unlike Mir or other real space stations, Solaris did not have any mildew. The air in a space station is a moist mess -- oh, and it's noisy as hell because there is nowhere for sound to dissipate.

I have decided to confess this as plainly as possible: I conquered my childhood obsessive-compulsive disorder by becoming a subtle slob.

I think I had OCD when I was a kid. No one used that term then. I would tap my toes inside my shoes an even number of times, then a couple more times in the other direction. I really liked the number 6 because it was 2 (parity, balance, the bifurcation of all things that stirs action) times 3 (trinity, coming around, fadduh bun and holy roast).

Yes, I really thought about two times three as a essential intersection of God's handiwork. Perhaps I was smarter when I was that age. My brain wanted things to do, so it played with numbers a lot. Perhaps I'd been hassled way too much by the other kids. I loved analog clocks for displaying 60 units, an immensely divisible number. I still wear an analog watch.

I know of at least a few days where I counted every step I took. I found faster ways to keep counting things on a beat: if I was going to count to eight, seven word turn into "sev" (and eight became "nate" in eliason) because I needed to keep a rhythm going. If I lost a rhythm, I'd have a quiet fit.

I never told my parents this stuff. I noticed no one else spoke about this stuff, so I figured it wasn't socially acceptable. My home town was also the home of the oldest asylum in America, so I was always afraid of winding up in the looney bin on York Street.

The only people I saw that had a related condition were the buladeens. This is the Sicilian term for a housewife that cleans her house so thoroughly, you couldn't even find dirt under her fridge. These frustrated women made up the 1950s of my father's childhood, the creepy aunts and grandmas of East Utica (pronounced "ease CHOO dickuh") of the 1980s or the divorcees of the women's lib movement.

My mother impressed on me as child that women's liberation was the single most important event in American history, second only to the advance of air conditioning. Those buladeens were kept down by idiot husbands. Then no-fault divorce arrived and became cheap and the Pill changed the consequences of sex, they left. While this left behind some messed-up kids (as did e.s.t.), the overall goal was vital.

My mother also wasn't into cleaning. I'd hear about kids being grounded for having messy rooms but I just not get that. My entire house was a library lacking shelves, a sound room without racks, a lot of stuff without places to go. I got the impression that cleaning a house was self-oppression. If the food stayed in the kitchen and on plates, then bugs stayed away. Do the dishes and clean anything a bug might make into food, but otherwise... meh. Be free from anal retention: piles sort themselves by time of accretion.

I understood my obsessions and I didn't want them to get worse. When I hit puberty, a lot of my mental noise quieted down. I am exceedingly grateful that my hormones liberated me. I also found out my body exuded copious hair, sweat, zits and jizz. Finally I had coporeal stuff to handle on a daily basis: shower, shave, fight the grease and release sexual frustration into Kleenex. I would scrape myself into condition and feel the urge of civilization. "All right, I am clean enough. Let's do something."

I understand why some people are really hung up on cleanliness. It's never going to be my scene, but I know the urge to create order can have a visceral pull. It's just not my bag. I've fought certain urges for perfection all of my life, but these had to do with putting new things into the world.

I'm also decent at cleaning, so long as it's not my stuff. I don't trust antibacterial soap, for example -- you need the background germs to keep the really scary germs away. I'll accept the occasional cold to avoid tuberculosis.

I appreciate certain kinds of messes. I cannot stand pr0n without hair in it: if the chick ain't got a bush, I ain't certain she's legal. I'm hirsute and I'd be a hypocrite to expect other people not to be. As felisdemens pointed out recently, I'm scared of dry gonads in my pr0n because they suggest no one is having a good time. I like arm pits. I appreciate deformities and imbalances as the honor of being alive.

I still have the number divisibility thing, although I don't do the tapping anymore. I can figure out the tip really quickly. I even tip large just so I can reach a whole number faster. "$67.42 for the four of us so... (sotto voce: 20% is 1 over 5. Closest number divisible by five is 65. 65 divided by 5 is 13 and I got all the decaf I wanted.) let's make it $14 for the tip."

I also understand something about the liberation movements I don't even think my mother understood. Before the 1970s, some alpha women married submissive men so that they could direct them and get any enjoyment from a life as second-class citizens. Some of the men complained of being "hen-pecked", but I think a lot of those men liked being abused. It got them off to be subbies.

The hen-pecked dialog has mostly disappeared and thank goodness. No one wants to hear a theoretically dominant person complain about the people that support him. "My wife can't cook!" Then cook your own meals, douche-matic. I think this is why very few pre-Vietnam comedians will ever appear funny again: lots of them just hated women and women didn't yet have the power to beat these assholes.

I guess it's a balancing act: I seek a certain level of disorder. When one of my stacks can no longer keep balance, I sort it out and it's clean. Then it can build up again. I cut my hair a little too close so that I'll have time for it to grow out. I won't join an organized religion for fear it will take my choices from me but I enjoy creating ceremonial events.

-physical challenge, Ps/d

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

nowhere for sound to dissipate

Sure there is. It gets absorbed by the material in the spaceship. It's just that modern spaceship design is centered around the "tin can filled with sheet metal" approach, rather than, say, the "tin can filled with wool" approach that might be more habitable...

It's more like why old cars are noisier than new luxury cars, with the added proviso that fixing it takes a lot more money.

[felisdemens.livejournal.com]

I think that clutter-slob and filth-slob are distinctly separate conditions, with filth-slobbery being connected strongly to depression. Just my half-assed assessment.