The Honest Courtesan

One of the main manifestations of my OCD is that I have a system for nearly everything I do.  My readers can see it in my blog: a new post every day, always at the same time, with certain kinds of columns appearing on certain days of the week and/or month in a strictly-managed format.  There’s even a lot of deep structure in the blog that few of y’all probably even notice, but which in my mind is an integral part of the blog’s structure.  And beneath that is another layer of organization completely invisible to y’all:  I write certain kinds of columns on certain days, and to a lesser extent certain times of day.  For example, I’m typing this on the evening of Tuesday, May 21st, because (unless life forces me to do it another time) I write Monday columns on the preceding Tuesday (after two of the news items for the next Saturday’s news column).  I pore over Twitter with my breakfast, collecting news items, commenting on what I find, and promoting things I’ve already written; I’m generally done about noonish and then move on to my morning ablutions, followed by my chores.  Afternoons vary by the day; I usually wash clothes on Monday and Friday, and also do my groceries on Monday.  Other days are for  appointments or weekly chores like vacuuming the floor or burning the garbage, and some days I actually manage to sneak in some other task I want to accomplish like baking cookies or tackling some kind of odious paperwork.  I cook dinner nearly every day, and there are patterns there too: red beans & rice on Mondays, soup & sandwich on Tuesdays, pasta on Thursdays, meatless Fridays, Tex-Mex Saturdays.  My cooking patterns aren’t merely daily and weekly, either; I usually make waffles on the first Friday of every month because we only eat a few, and the rest go into the fridge so Grace can rewarm them in the toaster oven for breakfast.  And similar patterns apply to other day/month combinations, which are of course subject to interruption by seasonal events; on top of that the times I cook, turn the lights on, feed the animals, and other such tasks follow a set schedule which varies by season.  Overwhelmed?  I’m not, because that’s how my brain works.  And directing my OCD toward scheduling chores and planning meals keeps me from obsessing too much about far more distracting minutiae, even though I also have the counting to 16 thing.