Day 14 of the blog. Weather: gray but warm. Mood: scatterbrained.
I am immensely sorry about missing my post yesterday, but things are afoot in Miss Anthropy’s world right now.
Today I want to talk about your neuroses and you. Everyone has them, whether they admit it or not, but when is the right time to tell a significant other about all your weird little habits? Some people say you should lay it all on the line up front; this is clearly a bit of idiocy because if you start listing off all your odd points, most people will at best think you aren’t very discrete, and at worst you’ll send them running and screaming in the opposite direction. Another camp says you should hide all your secrets until after the wedding night, but seeing as how marriage isn’t the lifelong bond it once was, this is also a dumb idea. Here at the Singlehood Chronicles, we advocate a happy medium approach, where you save the biggest ones until you’re reasonably sure he won’t get scared off. Minor neuroses can be used as ice breakers, and in this spirit, I wil share a few of mine with you today.
I have basically two kinds of neurosis: food and non-food. Probably 80% of the weird habits I maintain have to do with my food, and here are my top three:
1) Fruit Salad. It takes me about ten minutes to eat fruit salad because I must separate it into the separate fruits, organize each piece from smallest to largest, and then eat this whole ensemble one group at a time, largest to smallest, in reverse alphabetical order by fruit name. I no longer get cups of fruit salad to go, since I had a bad experience where one grape escaped detection until I was almost done with my snack. The resulting freak out from disorderly consumption of fruit salad forced me to give the remainder of the food away and be murderously grumpy for the next few hours.
2) My food absolutely cannot touch. I always prefer to serve myself because I can make sure that the entree, salad, and sides are separated by clean plate. Whenever possible, I’ll eat with those separated plates commonly used by toddlers or picky children. There are some exceptions to this rule, but not many. I also can’t stand when sauces or juices from one dinner component leaks and contaminates another component.
3) If I am craving a certain type of food, I cannot be satisfied by ANYTHING but that exact type of food. I have gone for literally days without eating because the food item I was craving was not at hand. And no, I’m not pregnant, because this has been a bad habit of mine for many years.
I don’t really want to share my non-food neuroses, since most of them are just weird without any possible kind of charming angle. So I’ll leave you with this bit of perspective. Obviously, I don’t have really the first clue about how things SHOULD be done, but here is my suggestion for how to handle neuroses: getting to know your partner is like embarking on a booby-trapped Easter egg hunt. Sometimes the treats will be in plain sight, and sometimes you’ll have to look a little harder for them. And sometimes an egg will not, in fact, bear candy or prizes, but will instead unleash a big ball of CRAZY. Or you’ll be reaching for a cluster of eggs, and you’ll fall into a pit of angry billy goats. This metaphor has gotten a bit out of control and I’m not sure how, but yeah, you get the gist of it, right?
