OCD and the midnight oil
Rather than properly adjusting to my home time zone, my schedule seems to be getting worse. I gave in and went to bed at 8pm yesterday, which means that I was awake at 4 something today. I lay in bed for a while, but I'm not good at being still once I'm awake, so around 445 I simply got up and went downstairs.
There's not a lot one can do at o'dark-thirty and not wake others. While laying in bed, one of the places my mind had wandered was getting a surprise tax refund from the US for 2009 because I had filed my taxes differently (claiming credit for the NZ tax paid rather than simply excluding the NZ income). What if this was true for other years? Once I asked this question, I couldn't let go of it. So at 445 I was downstairs redoing my 2008 tax forms. I looked at a couple of the other years, but it didn't look like it would make a difference. My surprise refund for 2009 was US$400; if I even got half that on another year, it would be a good investment of my time. Besides, what else was I going to do at that time of the morning?
When I talked to my friend Kathryn about my experiences with Marie in SF, she informed me that hoarding behaviours are actually a variation on OCD*. This actually helped me understand Marie's situation better and have more compassion about it. While I was staying up late compulsively tagging a decade's worth of photos because applying order to somethings soothed my distress about the chaos around me, maybe she was thinking 'things would be better if I had another 4 pounds of ground beef in the freezer just in case.'
* I took pictures of her house, but you can just look at the pictures here for an idea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_hoarding
There's not a lot one can do at o'dark-thirty and not wake others. While laying in bed, one of the places my mind had wandered was getting a surprise tax refund from the US for 2009 because I had filed my taxes differently (claiming credit for the NZ tax paid rather than simply excluding the NZ income). What if this was true for other years? Once I asked this question, I couldn't let go of it. So at 445 I was downstairs redoing my 2008 tax forms. I looked at a couple of the other years, but it didn't look like it would make a difference. My surprise refund for 2009 was US$400; if I even got half that on another year, it would be a good investment of my time. Besides, what else was I going to do at that time of the morning?
When I talked to my friend Kathryn about my experiences with Marie in SF, she informed me that hoarding behaviours are actually a variation on OCD*. This actually helped me understand Marie's situation better and have more compassion about it. While I was staying up late compulsively tagging a decade's worth of photos because applying order to somethings soothed my distress about the chaos around me, maybe she was thinking 'things would be better if I had another 4 pounds of ground beef in the freezer just in case.'
* I took pictures of her house, but you can just look at the pictures here for an idea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_hoarding