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(Yawn). Oh yeah, excuse me, I’m still waking up. I took a nap. Not just any old nap, but a late morning nap. And I took it before I wrote my blog post, and before I fixed dinner, and before I did any of a whole list of things I normally would do.
And that is something to write home about and alert the media too. Because that is not me. I am a should do person. And I am a delayed gratification person. All required tasks for the day must be done before we engage in such frivolous behaviors such as napping, or reading for pure pleasure, or well, you get the idea.
I recently took the Myers-Briggs personality test, again. I always come out pretty much the same.(Super duper important aside: Johnny Depp comes out the same as me. We are simpatico!!! I just knew it) I always answer those “spontaneous” questions the same way. You know the ones I mean. The ones that ask if you are orderly, organized, and not subject to a lot of “on the spur of the moment” kinda behavior.
I have answered similar types of questions in personality tests designed to find your perfect relationship, back in the years before I became a Mrs. and gave up such pursuits. (I found him)
They make me feel uncomfortable, because I know I’m supposed to answer that, in the middle of dying my hair (again something I no longer do), I can be enticed with the crook of a finger, to jump in the car and go off to watch a rodeo, a towel covering up the wet strands of hair still soaking up the blondy liquid designed to make me drop dead gorgeous in 20 minutes.
I’m not OCD of course, no, I leave that obsessive-compulsive chit to the Contrarian, who delights me unendingly with his quirky sandwich making requirements and demented need to examine the date on the milk container every 30 minutes or so.
No, no such compulsion, just a big watermelon feeling in the pit of my stomach should I even contemplate basking in the sun when there are still a bunch of “shoulds” on my mental list. That’s not OCD, surely not. I don’t break out in a sweat or anything, I’m not afraid the sky will freakin’ fall or anything, though I’m sure there are bad consequences from not attending to shoulds. It’s a perfectly normal genetic evolutionary development after all. Otherwise the cave would have been made unlivable with all the mastodon bones piling in the corner and all the bugs in the animal skins building up from lack of proper cleaning.
No, it’s not something I HAVE to do, it’s prudence. There I said, it. It’s just smart living, right? I can quit it any time I want to, but I know it makes for orderly living and clean living is next to Godliness, and we know what that means don’t we? See?
(Whoa, I thought I was channeling Randal there for a minute.)
Seriously, I think orderliness and attendance to shoulds is a reasonable way to live. It makes life manageable and we all want that don’t we? Who wants to be surprised every freakin’ morning? It’s Tuesday, so the toilets beckon to be cleaned. That’s normal right?
I don’t spend a lot of time looking over my shoulder I tell you. Because there is nothing crazy about the way I think, and so nobody is staring and pointing at me. Maybe at you, if you are one of those frivolous people who don’t do your laundry on Thursday and Friday and Monday, the days appointed by the great Laundry God Tide.
In my world, shoulds means using procrastination as a defense to being labeled as shhhhh OCD. So you pick about three things and don’t do them until the end of time only to prove that you are not a prisoner of shouldy living.
For me, it’s things like paying bills. I don’t pay bills. I quit paying bills when I married the Contrarian. Pretty much the first question I asked was, “do you mind paying bills?” When he said, “umm nah, not really,” I knew he was the one. I hate paying bills, and that is that.
So that all brings me around to the nap. The nap was a test to prove that I’m not ummmm compulsive. (Why does that word keep coming up here?) I took it, and I admit it and I’m proud I did. It was nice. It was not on the schedule. As a judge I knew once said to a defendant he was about to sentence. ” you knew it was wrong, but you did it anyway.” Yep, I did, and I’m not looking down in shame or trying to cover it up. It was not on the list, but I did it anyway.
So, I can only now look around superiorily and wonder why you’re so trapped in the world of should. I’m not, as you can see.
Existential Ennui 