ABCs of OCD (Semi-crossposted from cyber-cancer)
This entry is going to have two parts. The first is a crosspost from an entry I made on cyber-cancer back in November. This will give an introduction to what I mean by "the ABCs of OCD." I'm basically too lazy to introduce the subject and am just copying it instead. The second part will be a new post, freshly written.
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For those of you who don't know, I suffer from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). This section is not to make fun of people with OCD, I have honestly been diagnosed.
OCD sufferers frequently go through "rituals." These rituals are things that must be followed, or the person will feel very uncomfortable. There is almost always little rhyme or reason to the ritual, but it has to be followed anyway. Some common rituals among OCD sufferers are somewhat understandable - not stepping on cracks, waking up and walking straight to the shower, hitting the snooze button on their alarm clock a set number of times. Others, however... are usually pretty weird. Most sufferers don't even realize they follow most rituals, and even when they do they realize it's absurd. This section is for me to post some of the stranger rituals I realize I follow throughout the day.
Whenever I come to a staircase with steps that only rise a couple inches, I will commonly take two steps at a time. This seems to me to be pretty reasonable, and I'm sure other people would do the same thing. Today I was walking up a flight of stairs similar to what I just described. So I proceeded to take the steps, two at a time and I realized that there were an odd number of stairs on the staircase. I found myself on the next to last step feeling extremely uneasy. The obvious answer would have been to just treat the final step as an individual, but I felt compelled to take it with the same sized stride I had used on the previous ones. Obviously, that wouldn't work. I briefly considered walking all the way down the staircase and walking back up one at a time. That would have made me feel balanced again, but taken up too much time - I was in a rush. My solution, then, was to use the same stride I had used on the previous stairs - overshooting the top step. I stumbled a bit, but I felt normalized and at ease with the situation.
But I bet to anyone who was watching, I looked like a complete douche bag.
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I talk about music a lot. If I'm sitting on my computer, I'm almost always listening to music. If I'm driving, I'm always listening to music. I'm allowed to listen to music at my full time job, too. So basically, I pretty much center my life around music.
Now, for anyone who is reasonably organized, having uniformly entered and sorted ID3 tags is important. The way you search through your library on your computer depends on them. The way they are stored on your iPod is stored by ID3 tags. As you could expect, they really do matter, and that's [hopefully] not my OCD talking.
Now more on topic. I added a bunch of new albums to my library in the last week or two. I've added two Relient K albums, Weezer's new Red album, and the new Panic at the Disco album (Pretty. Odd.).
What's the problem you ask? Did you notice when I said "Panic at the Disco" I didn't put the exclamation point after Panic like they used to have? I guess they made the official decision to drop it from the group's name before the release of Pretty. Odd. So now I'm left with a conundrum - whether or not to put the exclamation point in the artist tag for Pretty. Odd. Omitting the exclamation point leaves me comfortable because the tags will be 100% correct. Putting it in, though, makes it so both albums by the band are listed as being by the same band. This saves a lot of hassle if I want to shuffle all Panic(!) songs, for instance.
Long story short, I don't know what to do and it's pissing me off. Does anybody have a way to skirt the issue in iTunes?
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For those of you who don't know, I suffer from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). This section is not to make fun of people with OCD, I have honestly been diagnosed.
OCD sufferers frequently go through "rituals." These rituals are things that must be followed, or the person will feel very uncomfortable. There is almost always little rhyme or reason to the ritual, but it has to be followed anyway. Some common rituals among OCD sufferers are somewhat understandable - not stepping on cracks, waking up and walking straight to the shower, hitting the snooze button on their alarm clock a set number of times. Others, however... are usually pretty weird. Most sufferers don't even realize they follow most rituals, and even when they do they realize it's absurd. This section is for me to post some of the stranger rituals I realize I follow throughout the day.
Whenever I come to a staircase with steps that only rise a couple inches, I will commonly take two steps at a time. This seems to me to be pretty reasonable, and I'm sure other people would do the same thing. Today I was walking up a flight of stairs similar to what I just described. So I proceeded to take the steps, two at a time and I realized that there were an odd number of stairs on the staircase. I found myself on the next to last step feeling extremely uneasy. The obvious answer would have been to just treat the final step as an individual, but I felt compelled to take it with the same sized stride I had used on the previous ones. Obviously, that wouldn't work. I briefly considered walking all the way down the staircase and walking back up one at a time. That would have made me feel balanced again, but taken up too much time - I was in a rush. My solution, then, was to use the same stride I had used on the previous stairs - overshooting the top step. I stumbled a bit, but I felt normalized and at ease with the situation.
But I bet to anyone who was watching, I looked like a complete douche bag.
----------------------
I talk about music a lot. If I'm sitting on my computer, I'm almost always listening to music. If I'm driving, I'm always listening to music. I'm allowed to listen to music at my full time job, too. So basically, I pretty much center my life around music.
Now, for anyone who is reasonably organized, having uniformly entered and sorted ID3 tags is important. The way you search through your library on your computer depends on them. The way they are stored on your iPod is stored by ID3 tags. As you could expect, they really do matter, and that's [hopefully] not my OCD talking.
Now more on topic. I added a bunch of new albums to my library in the last week or two. I've added two Relient K albums, Weezer's new Red album, and the new Panic at the Disco album (Pretty. Odd.).
What's the problem you ask? Did you notice when I said "Panic at the Disco" I didn't put the exclamation point after Panic like they used to have? I guess they made the official decision to drop it from the group's name before the release of Pretty. Odd. So now I'm left with a conundrum - whether or not to put the exclamation point in the artist tag for Pretty. Odd. Omitting the exclamation point leaves me comfortable because the tags will be 100% correct. Putting it in, though, makes it so both albums by the band are listed as being by the same band. This saves a lot of hassle if I want to shuffle all Panic(!) songs, for instance.
Long story short, I don't know what to do and it's pissing me off. Does anybody have a way to skirt the issue in iTunes?