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Obsessive Compulsiveness

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Mountain View California -- I want to talk a little about my brother today. My brother has these obsessive compulsive behaviors which are pretty amusing, and might be worth sharing. For starters, my brother has outfits. He has exactly two shirts designated to match with each of his pair of pants. Each pair of pants has a specific pair of shoes that goes with it, but each pair of shoes is designated two pairs of pants, resulting in four total outfits for each pair of shoes. The three pairs of shoes and twelve total outfits are rotated between days to vary his appearance, giving a variety of looks to match his hairstyle, which does not change for any day. The hairstyle of choice consists of a straight part on the left that is gelled smoothly over to the side, except for the three hairs on the right that he carefully moves a little bit out of place, and then gels again to make sure they stay in their carefree, out-of-place location.

This quality of my brother’s was great when we were kids and he cleaned up for the both of us after a giant Lego castle building party, but got kinda annoying after it starting applying itself to things that did not involve cleaning up after me. For example, I went over to help my brother hang up a painting in his bedroom (carefully chosen to match the color of his bed sheets) where I waited about half a menstrual cycle for him to get the painting in the just right place and straight enough for his liking. Finally, we hit the nail into the drywall, hooked up the vacuum cleaner to vacuum up the bit of drywall dust that was created by the nail, and then hung the painting by the bed for about two seconds until it was decided that the painting was an inch too high. We spackled and painted the first hole so that it would not show and then got the vacuum back out of the closet again, ready to clean up the drywall dust from round 2 of painting hanging.

Anyway, the reason I am writing all this is because it want to explain my first (and my favorite) anecdote in a recent column that mentions my brother. You see, not ALL of his clothes are actually designated into one of the twelve outfits. In my brother’s bureau, in a very special drawer, there is a small number of shirts specially put aside for use on Spontaneous Days. On the rare day of spontaneity, my brother will wake up, put on a matching shirt-pant-belt set, and then recklessly ignoring the integrity of the outfits, put on a shirt that is daringly allowed to match any one of the six pairs of pants.

A rebel without a cause, indeed.

He also told me last Monday that he could not hang out with me on Thursday night because he was “being spontaneous on Thursday.” Whatever that means...  ¶ 8:01 PM