Areas of Unrest

12 September 1999 - Pathological Quirks

QOTD: "In the year 2025, one out of ten people will be an Elvis impersonator" - El Vez

Reading: William Westervelt, Hawaiian Legends of Ghosts and Ghost-Gods

Listening to: At Home With The Chenille Sisters

I should probably never read pop-psych of any sort. I'd heard an interview on the radio with Amy Wilensky, author of a memoir titled Passing for Normal, about her struggles with Tourette's syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). What interested me was how functional she seemed. I'd always had the impression that Tourette's was horribly disabling, not that it was actually anything I knew much about. I'd read a brief article in a psychology encyclopedia my parents had and had been impressed by the description of coprolalia (random shouting of obscenities), which it turns out actually affects only about 15% of people with Tourette's. And there was a description by Oliver Sacks in one of his books. Anyway, the interview was interesting enough that I picked up the book.

When I read it, I noticed something. OCD is very common amongst people with Tourette's and Wilensky describes a lot of her compulsive symptoms. And what struck me is that many of the things she described are things I do. Consider, for example, the need for things to be exactly in order. I've mentioned before that I will get up and walk across a room to "fix" things if a phone is hung up backwards. I'll also break off a conversation to straighten a picture. And don't you ever dare to take a CD out and not put it back in the right place!

Then there are these things I have about certain numbers. I always set my alarm clock for times that end in a 7 or a 3, for example. What is really silly about this is that my rationale is that this makes it easier for me to read the time on the clock as being the clock and not the time the alarm is set for. This is patently absurd, of course. When the alarm goes off at 5:17, both the clock display and the alarm display show 5:17 and that would be the case no matter what time, even if the alarm were set for a really "bad" time like 5:22.

And I always eat foods that come in small units by twos. I like Heath bars and Reese's peanut butter cups better than other candies because they come two to a package. When I buy sesame brittle, I always buy exactly 10 pieces. Similarly, I always buy mushrooms in tens and I count off ten grapes at a time. However, the number I think I'm usually most fixated on is eight and I sometimes count to eight (often while tapping my toes alternately) for no particular reason.

Another really compulsive thing I've noticed is that, when I have to step down a steep step or onto an escalator, I have to step with my left foot first. I may even take a small step in place with my right foot to make this work. The origin of this is pretty obvious - I've sprained my right ankle twice and broken it once, so I think of it as less steady, but it really isn't all that rational as the probability of my leg collapsing while stepping onto an escalator is clearly miniscule.

Most of all, I have a thing about completeness. It drives my tendency to collect things; if I have one book in a series, I have to have them all. (And I have to read them in order.) It's why I felt so driven about going to every state. And I will confess that the idea of going to every country in the world does appeal to me, but I am hesitant because I know it's not really feasible and I'm not sure I can deal with the anxiety of that incompleteness. (As an aside, I did print out the State Department's list of independent countries and their separate list of dependencies. I've been to 28 of the 190 independent countries and 3 of the 62 dependencies.)

So I spent a couple of weeks obsessing about whether or not I might have OCD. Then I went out and got another book on OCD and did a couple of the self-test things in it, which turned out to be inconclusive. The interesting question is where the border is between "normal" quirkiness and OCD. As far as I can tell, I'm straddling that border. The stuff I mention above is clearly not quite normal - but it also doesn't disrupt my life to any significant degree. Overall, I had my usual pop-psych reaction, which is to decide that I am both sicker and healthier than I'd thought.

Which is I suppose what those books are supposed to do. People don't buy self-help books unless they want to decide they have whatever the current popular syndrome is. We loved too much, were afraid of success, needed to be more assertive and related to Peter Pan's Wendy, to Cinderella, to Snow White, to Hamlet. Realistically, most of us are just a little bit strange and not really pathological at all.

It's obviously time to dive into the stack of mysteries instead.

On an entirely different subject, I don't usually engage in metadiscussion here, but the new issue of the revived Metajournals is out and there's an interview with me. Juan had asked on one of the mailing lists if anybody had done anything interesting and I asked if having been to every continent counts. I think the resulting article is just okay, since there are at least four errors in it, but there are a couple of pictures. Since I carefully selected them, they're pictures I like. One was taken at Neko Harbor in the Antarctic and has some penguins and seals as well as me wearing more clothing at one time than I ever had before or am likely to since. The other was from an ostrich farm in Oudthoorn, South Africa.