Hush Hush, Keep it Down Now...

Voices carry...Hush Hush, keep it down now...voices carry.

Yes, good old rat-tailed Aimee Mann and her infectious `Til Tuesday concoction is stuck in my head and I can't get it out and I can't go to sleep.

It's 1:13 in the AM and I just finished a freelance article for the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. (Just like Playboy, people read it for the articles.) This particular piece was about a newly coined term "orthorexia nervosa" which is basically an eating disorder where the sufferer is not obsessed with weight loss but with acheiving a "perfect" or "pure" diet. This involves complex rules and a lot of guilt and "punishing" behavior when the person eats a "wrong" or "bad" food.

My favorite quote was from this OCD expert who said, "Obsessions are as varied as the creativity of the human mind."

I have a little touch of the OCD. When I was younger, I needed to touch things an even number of times and repeat certain phrases whenever I looked at the clock and it had all the same numbers (e.g: 3:33 or 4:44). I wasn't as bad as David Sedaris, but I had it enough that I was like, "What is up with this?" I asked my Dad about it and he said, "You'll grow out of it."

I did, for the most part, but my obsession with touching and phrases was subsequently replaced with:

Fingernail biting
Hair pulling
Scalp picking
Always having to have the television on Channel 5 before I turn it off
Always having to check the oven before we leave on a trip like 20 times
Developing severe hypochrondria
Developing whacked out panic attacks

Oh...also, no riding elevators for like two years.

I know I'm going to get, like, whacked upside the head for this by some depressive. But sometimes I wish I had been wired for depression instead of anxiety/OCD. Depression is so much more attractive and artsy and, frankly, requires less energy. The depressives are all Plath and Hemingway-like with their poetry and their suicides and their winters of their discontent and all that. Depression is beds and wasting disease and sleeping for ten hours and The Smiths.

Who do the neurotics have? Basically, making color-coded TO DO Excel spreadsheets at 3 in the morning, throwing up, repeating the same phrase or song lyric over and over and over again in bed, chewing your hair, nervous tics, rocking back and forth in your chair while jiggling your foot up and down, and Woody Allen.

The depressives get sympathy and the neurotics get laughed at.

Hush hush...keep it down now...voices carry. Hush hush...keep it down now...voices carry. Hush hush...keep it down now...voices carry. Hush hush...keep it down now...voices carry. Hush hush, keep it down now...voices carry...etc.

Feel free to tell me I'm wrong...I probably am. Don't be too mad with what I've just said.

Oh yeah, obsession number 328: People will hate me.