Being A Little OCD Sucks Sometimes

  I spent the last couple days sorting through 410 articles for our new site at work, trying to sort them into categories and find relevant tags for all of them. It covers a lot of ground, so the lists got pretty long. I think I put together a pretty decent one though, one that was comprehensive but not exhaustive. I took it upon myself to put it together because it was starting to look like the alternative was another brainstorming session that probably wouldn't yield too many finalized results. And I guess it went over well, for the most part.
    The problem with this one is that there are too many cooks in the kitchen, I think, and everyone has their own idea of how to sort the content out. But, being that I'm the one who's going to be managing the content and probably the one who will have to go through and categorize and tag a lot of the content we currently have, My idea makes the most sense. I don't think that's immodest or stubborn, I think it's just realistic. I have a good overall understanding of how the content stands currently, and I think the way I've planned the organization of it makes the most sense for what we have on hand, as well as being a good place for us to move forward when we get new content in.
    I'm not saying my way or the highway, but kind of. When you have a website of this magnitude, there needs to be a process in place for handling certain areas, like content, as we move forward. If I create a process, I know I can stick to it. All that's left is making sure whoever comes in at any point to help with the content knows how I do it and does it the same way so that everything on the site is uniform and nothing gets confused or messed up because somebody didn't follow procedure.
    I am aware of how neurotic and OCD this sounds, but I am a little neurotic and OCD. When I have a job, I find a way to do it the best, most efficient and most organized way possible. It's one thing for the articles themselves to have different content--of course they would--they're written by a bunch of different people with different writing styles. It's quite another for them to be SEO'd and formatted differently because the people we have in-house are not all doing it the same way. I think that looks sloppy. And if I'm in charge of the content, you better believe it won't look sloppy for long.
    So, I may be compulsive and excessively organized, but it pays off from time to time. My high school psych teacher always used to tell us there was a method to her madness, which I always found terribly amusing because a psych teacher talking about madness is pretty funny/ironic, and I completely agree. I may do things the hard way and I may dot every single I and cross every last T, but there is always a reason for everything I do when it comes to this stuff. I don't do things without thinking, and while maybe my solutions or processes aren't perfect every time, I always have a very reasonable explanation for having done things that way. I don't think this makes me inflexible, it just keeps me organized.

One more person says "a whole nother" and I think I'll scream.

What are your little pet peeves, idiosyncrasies and neuroses? 

Or are you so easy-going that nothing bothers you?

Explain in the comments. ;)

Drawing A Line In The Sand

  I use movies as an emotional crutch occasionally. A really bad mood can all turn around with a good movie. An average humdrum day can become memorable after seeing an excellent movie. You can be this close to tearing your eyes out, and then you see a hilarious comedy and you forget what you were pissed off at in the first place. But movies can have an effect on you that is not for the better. You watch too many chick flicks and you might start to believe that relationships work like that in real life. You see too many action movies, you're liable to accidentally karate chop your boss one day while doing a demonstration. You sit through too many suspense or horror movies, every noise in the night, every innocent sound around you, will turn into something sinister. This isn't a guaranteed consequence, but it can happen, and does. It just depends on how much you suspend your disbelief when you watch films, and how long it takes you to un-suspend it after the movie's over.
    I will leave the lights on when I go to bed after I see a movie that really scared me. I will seriously contemplate taking up kung fu or jujitsu after seeing a great action movie, though I give up on the idea after a few days. And I will believe in fairy tale romance after a real tear-jerking girlie movie.
    It's a just a movie, we remember, after the effects wear off. Stuff like that doesn't really happen. But the dreamer in us tries to convince us otherwise. Wouldn't life be great if that could happen? Wouldn't things be easier if I knew how to do this? Wouldn't the world be a better place if things worked that way? We are seduced by the possibilities that what if puts forth. To the point that we think we probably could do the things they do in the movies, without wires, and we probably could be attacked by aliens sometime this week, and the guy will remember your anniversary and play that song from the John Hughes movie you loved when you were a teenager.
    But just because we'd like to believe that stuff like that actually can happen doesn't mean we should. We can draw that line between fantasy that movies create, and reality that prevents those things from really happening. We just have to remember that gravity does exist, demons do not, and while true love may exist, the perfect partner does not. Everyone has their flaws and if you love them, you will love them in spite of those flaws.
As enjoyable as it is to lose yourself in a fantasy for a couple hours at a movie, when the movie's over, we have to remember to unplug our brains and come back to reality. Failure to do so can cause serious problems. Usually interpersonal problems rather than psychological or physical, but serious nonetheless.
    People skills succeed or fail based on our ability to evaluate, communicate and understand the people around us. If our expectations of others are unrealistic, whether we think they're a Russian spy or Prince Charming, our ability to live in the world as we know it will fail because we have failed to accurately and effectively evaluate and communicate with the people we interact with on a daily basis.

Back to reality.

Basic Instincts

  Remember what I said about tolerance a while back? Forget all that. Just kidding. [PS: Apologies for not posting lately. My internet's been down ): ]
    Why is that we feel it's okay to stop tolerating people? Or not tolerate certain people. Certain people "bring it on themselves" or "have a bad attitude" or are just "different" that they don't deserve our acceptance. At least, this is what we like to tell ourselves. I'll admit, as preachy as I may get, I'm guilty of this one. Every now and again, I'll meet a person who I immediately just don't like. This dislike may occur for various reasons--while I like to blame it on pheromones, that may not be the entire truth of the matter. It's physiologically possible for us to dislike people based on the pheromones they excrete, just like it's physiologically programmed for us to be attracted to certain people based on their pheromones. It's a tactic we've evolved to help us find the most suitable mates and most evolutionarily compatible (i.e. non-threatening and non-harmful) companions. But pheromones may also warn us to stay away from certain people the way taste buds warn us about harmful foods.
    I'm no scientist, by anyone's standards. So, take this scientific speak with a grain of salt based on my limited understanding of how the body, and brain, work. If something is bitter, our taste buds let us know, and many times we will tend to avoid that food in the future. If someone's pheromones are distasteful, so to speak, our brain tells us we may want to avoid that person. Here's a question: should we trust our initial physiological instinctive reactions, or should we give people a second chance and try to let them overcome their biology with their psychology?
    Normally, I'd say the latter, but these physiological reactions exist for a reason--self-preservation. Maybe these people aren't all axe murderers or evil geniuses, but what is the reason that our bodies react against them? Perhaps they aren't physically harmful, but psychologically, it's possible. Misery loves company, as they say, and these people we instinctively dislike may be psychologically harmful, if they are negative people, pessimistic people, or just unhappy people. The question is, does our biology pick up on this negativity and send a message to stay away from them so as not to pollute our own psychological well-being? Or am I just whistling dixie out of my ass to justify why we dislike some people?
    As much as I'd like to believe that we all have it within us to be kind and generous and good-hearted towards everyone and anyone, I do believe that there are some people that we will just never like. We may be able to be civil to them and put on a good face, but there will always be something about them that will rub us the wrong way.
    While there aren't too many people out there, I'm talking real people that you meet--not celebrities, politicians, or athletes--that I honestly dislike for whatever reason, there are a couple. I can get along with most anyone, and I try to. I hate confrontation, and I suck at arguments, so staying on people's good sides is something I work very hard at. But every now and again, there comes a person that I genuinely just don't like. I can never put my finger on exactly why. I can give reasons, they have a bad attitude, they're too cocky, they're disrespectful, etc, but those things are not the whole story. They're reasonable reasons for not liking someone, but the dislike goes beyond that. There is just something about them, a je ne sais quoi, but in a bad way, that turns me off about them.
    Clearly, I haven't really made much of an argument for either side of this topic, whether we dislike people for a real physiological reason or whether we make up reasons for why we dislike them, and then there's the further thought: do we trust our instincts about people or should we give them the benefit of the doubt?
    Personally, I think we do dislike people for physiological reasons sometimes, and when that happens, we ought to give them a second chance, or even a third, to redeem themselves. Sometimes they'll surprise you. But sometimes, you're not going to like them no matter how hard you try, and the most you can do is just be nice to them as best you can, and not let the negativity you get from them eat away at you.

Attraction or aversion: which is more easily overcome?

Dead Men Tell No Tales, Or Do They?

Literally, of course they don't. But what about the dead men (and women) who've written so many of the books that sit on your bookshelf at this very moment?
    The books that one reads can say a lot about a person. I, for example, might come off like a nihilistic maniac cook with what's on the bookshelf I'm looking at right now. I have several bookshelves, but this particular one contains almost exclusively books written by Elmore Leonard, Stephen King, and over a year's worth of Martha Stewart Everyday Food magazines. It also includes Orwell's 1984, also a nonfiction book about a 19th century serial killer from the Chicago World's Fair, some Dostoevsky, and a couple other nonfiction books and novels.
    I can't imagine anyone could really call me a maniac just for having so many Stephen King books. It's not like I've marked them up with devious little notes and furious scribbling. I suppose I just prefer getting a scare from a book than from a movie most of the time. And as for the Leonard books, I don't think there are too many people in this country who don't enjoy crime dramas, though they may get it on television instead of from a book with shows like NCIS, CSI, Law and Order, Detroit 187, Psych! (a comedy, but still a crime-related program), among myriad others. However, not to leave anyone out, many people do get their hankering for crime drama from a book, like those by James Patterson, Sue Grafton, and James Ellroy, to name a few.

The $64,000 question is, then, is it permissible, and more importantly, is it accurate, 

to judge a person by the books on their bookshelves?

What if I were to say that I had Jane Austen and all the Adventures of the Bailey School Kids books as well as Mein Kampf or The Communist Manifesto? Would that make me a communist? Or a racist? Or just peculiar, for still having books I read when I was eight?
    If we take Morgan Freeman's character (in the movie Se7en), to have given us a fact, we would have to consider the possibility that the US government tracks what books are checked out of the library for these kinds of suspicions, and according to this assumption, certain books are flagged--like Mein Kampf. Maybe it's movie bullsh*t and maybe it isn't, but if you're doing a paper on dictatorships through history, or even rituals and peculiarities of cults or Druids or something, you could feasibly come across one of these books that's "flagged." And then you get put on a "list." And nobody wants to be on that kind of list.
    While I'm certainly not suggesting that anyone ought to stop reading, or even that people should be more careful of what they read, some stuff is trash, but some stuff is "bad trash" (the way that Stephen King tells us his mother used to refer to certain literature). In other words, some stuff is worth reading, and some isn't.
    In any case, I don't think that what you read gives some deep, psychological insight into you as a person. I know there are plenty of people who do think exactly this--some psychologists, for example. While I don't think psychology is completely irrelevant, sometimes they reach for something that's just not there. Perhaps too much Freud addled their brains and caused them to see everything as a sign of the Oedipus complex or penis envy.
    I think if you read a book, it could be for a class or for enjoyment or plain curiosity.
But when something terrible happens, we want a reason. An answer. It's our nature.

Example: 'But why can't I eat from the tree?' 

'Because I said so.' 

But that's not reason enough. 

    We want something more concrete. And sometimes, we suffer the consequences when we go digging for those answers. But psychologizing everything is not the answer.

    Sometimes, ladies and gentlemen: sh*t happens.

    There are crazy people, and there are mean people, and there are people just trying to get attention. And then there's Maude. Just kidding ;) And then there's the rest of us just plugging along, trying to get from start to finish, without too much fuss in between.
    Since I'm starting to wonder what my point is, I suppose I ought to sum up. My point this: sh*t happens, and coming up with irrational and ridiculous reasons to try to explain it isn't going to make it un-happen. We move on, and we do our best to be aware enough, and brave enough, to see the signs and prevent the sh*t from happening the next time. It is not impossible. But you can't look the other way and pretend it's not there and then say, oh, what a shame, when it happens anyway.
    Participate. Be engaged with the world around you. You never know, you could do something really helpful, worthwhile, and even, perhaps, heroic, the next time the sh*t does go down.

Mindfulness, consideration, and courage, dear friends, courage.