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Confessions of one with weird wiring

I had a nice, new yellow legal pad in front of me where I was sitting at the kitchen table.

It’s my favorite kind of thing to write on, especially when I’m making a list of things to do and feeling in overachiever mode.

But just as I was about to commit to paper the first thing on this list that I wanted to do, it happened.

A drop of coffee quit defying gravity and headed south from the outside of my mug to the middle of the nice, new yellow legal pad.

Splat went the coffee drop on what had been up until that moment my nice, new yellow legal pad – pristine paper now coffee contaminated.

I winced, realizing I couldn’t proceed under these kind of stressful circumstances.

I looked over at my sister who was watching me and smiled apologetically, feeling a little confession moment welling within me.

I told her I couldn’t make a list on that piece of paper now, that I was going to have to start from scratch on a clean sheet. Don’t mind me.

Now a “normal” person might not have even noticed the coffee splat and would have written right on top of the wet spot without a blink or second thought, but not me.

No can do.

My sister did not sit in judgment, however, but instead laughed, acknowledging a little non-normalcy in her own way of doing things, too, including her list-making ways.

If she starts a list and makes a mistake, for example, she has to start over on a clean sheet of paper. It wouldn’t be right to just scratch out the mistake and keep going.

Ditto if there are ink blobs from an uncooperative pen.

It looks messy. Yuck.

Talk about bonding.

And so we shared one of those sibling moments when you realize maybe there’s a little evidence of obsessive compulsive disorder among the branches of the family tree. Or maybe it’s just weirdness in our wiring.

Whatever the case, it prompted some conversation about our quirks.

I motor-mouthed my way through enough examples to make a convincing case for myself.

It’s official. I’m an oddball.

I have this thing about curtains being together, not separated and all bunched up behind furniture.

I’m a chronic straightener-upper, unnerved by hand towels stuffed in the wall ring instead of hanging there nice and neat.

Throw rugs can’t just be “thrown” on a floor.

And stuff on my desk at work – the piles all have to be neat and orderly and parallel to each other.

Better Half listened to all this with moderate interest as he breezed through another crossword puzzle.

He mentioned that it’s too bad all this pursuit of perfection on my part doesn’t carry over into something practical in our lives, like doing dishes that I’m inclined to wash with speed, but not success.

He has a point there, and I’ll definitely make a note of it, but it’ll have to be on a super clean piece of paper.

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