i am neurotic.

I have to have all white hangers in my closet. Sometimes, my brother will switch out my white hangers for colored ones and I get very angry. Then, I must switch out the hanger(s) that very second and do something for payback.

I am a ‘straightener’. Whenever I go into a store and see a display, I stand there and straighten stuff up. I only seem to be annoyed by stuff like the health care stuff; shampoo, pills, body washes, etc. Today I went to TJ Maxx and was straightening up the lotions and shampoos, pretending I was looking at each bottle. I try not to spend too long doing it; I can only imagine the people watching the security cameras: “Hey, Mike! Come look at this chick!” My dream job would be to do this all day long. I line the bottles and stuff up in neat rows, and each item needs to be in its proper place or with similar items.

I get extremely nervous when chairs are not arranged properly around a table. If the table is big and has lots of chairs, each one needs to be perfectly straight and pushed in. If it’s a room full of chairs, they all need to be facing the same way in an orderly fashion. When I see that all the chairs around a table or in a room are correct except for one, I get especially anxious and I cannot go on with my life until it’s fixed.

When I see pencils, pens, rulers, coffee cups, whatever on a desk, I have to arrange them so that they are parallel and from longest to shortest. I cannot stand the SATs or college tests in lecture halls because the desks are too small to arrange everything and i wind up arranging them on my lap.

I have to put my nicer clothes on nicer hangers. But, my less nice clothes go on the wire hangers, and the hangers left I feel bad for because they are being excluded from the closet society because of the way they are. No one likes a wire hanger.

Neurotic people make me neurotic. I once lived with a girl who kept everything spotlessly clean. I live in organized clutter. It would drive me absolutely crazy whenever she reorganized my stuff because then I couldn’t find anything (I know where everything is about 95% of the time). I bet half the people reading this are thinking, “I hate it when people do that, too!” and the other half are thinking, “I never want to live with you.”

When I close my eyes, I see a jumbled up chaotic mess of grey and black..like jumbled cables. I have to mentally unjumble them before I can open my eyes. I feel like it is all the negative in my head and I am systematically clearing it up.

When I eat Tiny Teddies, I must sort them according to their facial expressions. I then must eat them evenly, taking from each pile alternately, ensuring that the last one I eat is a happy one.

i have to set my workspace up the same way everyday so i can work frantically, let the order deteriorate and set it up the right way again.