Organizational Bliss (6C)

I look to my bookshelf just across from my bed and I see my alphabetical system in effect.  My DVD collection, ranging from Bridesmaids to Zombieland, stand on the left side of the shelf in order based on title.  My books, by last name of author, stand on the right, from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (my, what a lovely alphabetically ordered name) to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  In between my movies and books in a short pile sit my readings for the year (because they’re books for pain and not pleasure), from Theodore Dreiser down to Tennessee Williams.

Croon on, Lana. Also marvel at my library’s organization.

A cover of Lana Del Rey’s ‘Video Games’ by The Young Professionals comes to an end on my iTunes. When I maximize the window and feel like listening to the original, I scroll up to L to find Ms. Del Rey’s entire discography, in order of release, with every subheading in iTunes filled out: title, artist, album, year, genre, even track number.  In the cover flow on the top of the window, a smoky Lana stares down at me from the 300×300 pixel album artwork I pulled from Google.

I love alphabetization.

Knowing that my books, movies and music are all in alphabetical order is comforting to me.  Alphabetical order has been ingrained in my system since elementary school, where teachers would never let us kids back into the school after recess until we filed ourselves into a line, alphabetical by last name.  With a last name starting with S I never had much to worry about, but it was almost like an exciting game to me when I watched my classmates try to figure out who they stand in front of and behind.  Even though the class list never changed it was still a struggle in May.

Alphabetization allows for easy access.  If I feel like rereading the Harry Potter series, I know it’s on the fourth shelf down in my bedroom at home.  My DVD collection, as seen in my little header for this blog here, is aesthetically pleasing as much as it is systematic.  I’ve gone back and forth between ordering them based on title or based on director.  But by back and forth I mean I take about three hours to reorganize all of my movies by-director only to change it back to by-title because by-director looks so jumbled.

Organization is everything.

This is so lovely.

My bliss is in keeping things in a system.  The clothes in my closet can’t really be alphabetized, but they can be organized!  Starting on the left side of my closet: heavy knit sweaters, thin sweaters, sweater vests, cardigans, long sleeve shirts, short sleeve shirts, t-shirts, t-shirts with logos on them, dress shirts, classy shit (my button up vest, my ties), sweatpants, jeans.  And within each of these categories, the clothes are organized by colour.  There’s no standard order for colour, you say.  Although the majority of the stuff I wear is black, I go by the rainbow.

My iTunes, as I previously stated, looks like perfection.  But all perfection has a price: before I decided to organize everything perfectly, artists and album titles and all that were sporadically blank, so it literally took me about three or four days of nonstop work to fill in the missing information, album covers, and most importantly (and most tedious!), track numbers.  The price was worth it: people marvel at my files.  My computer is filed in a similar systematic way.

Matt, you’re weird.

Oh, I know.

I look back at this post and see how much it reeks of weirdness.  I’m not actually excited by alphabetization, although I do find it fun to do.  While I find it the most logical of systems, it really doesn’t add much to the speed in which I might select something from my shelf.  Organization in my closet is a little bit more practical, but even if it fails to address a real need it’s nice to look at, at the very least.  Regardless, much like with all of my weird tendencies, it’s all for comfort: a comfort in my familiar logic.  I’m comfortable with a system I’ve established for myself – just like with my weird guidelines for my notebooks, or with how I go about Canada’s Wonderland – and so I find happiness in what I’ve accepted as functional.

I feel a little bit like Monica on Friends.  This post just makes me think of the episode where Monica, Rachel, Chandler and Joey have a trivia contest about one another in order to win Monica’s apartment, and one of the lightning round questions involves Monica’s organization of towels which sounds a lot like how I go about organizing my closet.  (0:38)

Yeah… I’m very Monica.

Sick like a Dog (5C)

This post is only fitting: I’m writing this with a runny nose, sore throat, and my bed is littered with Kleenex boxes and comfort foods (Cheetos).  It makes for a very miserable Matt, especially considering that I made myself go to class today and every food and drink I force down tastes like my icky throat.  It’s the second time I’ve gotten sick this school year already and that’s nowhere near my record.

I have the worst immune system known to man.

I do declare, I am sick.

Admittedly, I don’t take care of myself as well as I should be: my sleeping patterns are just okay, but I still somehow sleep hours longer than almost all of my friends; I eat out on campus because it’s convenient and because I’m a dreadful cook; I have no sort of vitamin or exercise regimen aside from eating a handful of Vitamin C chewables when I feel sick out paranoia or aside from going to the gym once a month.  All things considered, I sound like a typical university student.

Since my days in elementary school I was always one of the kids who got sick the most.  You’d think my body would be completely immune to germs and common colds, but no; in fact, when I was a kid, my doctor told me I was a carrier of strep throat, so that was awesome.  My parents sent me to school even if I was feet away from Death’s doorstep – I went to school with pneumonia for two weeks before they decided I wasn’t faking a sickness to get out of class.

Things never changed when I got to university.  Without fail, for the past four years in a row, I get horribly sick the first week in September, and the pattern repeats itself in January whenever I move back, no doubt because my immune system is like, oh my god, so many new germs everywhere, I surrender.

My bones are made of glass.

Not only do I fall victim to sickness: I have broken a total of six bones in my body.  Why?  Because I’m a big guy, so when I fall, I fall hard.

• 

  Me and my old friend the boot cast.

  Fracture in my right wrist: ah, my first.  It was Bring Your Friend to Camp Day so I was the friend who was brought to camp.  Then came time for the water slide, which was really a sheet of plastic on a steep hill that counselors poured soap onto.  Crash, fall, break.

• Broken finger: my sister pulled at my finger to get ahead of me when we were racing.

• Sprained ankle, but I totally broke it: Survivor was starting so I ran through my kitchen and wiped out on a massive puddle by the door.  I really like Survivor, okay?

• Fracture in my left wrist: drove my bike right off a boardwalk, fell into a swamp, and in the mix I broke my wrist.  This was three hours into my weekend camping trip.  I have not been bike riding since.

• (are you eating?  No?  Good) Fractured kneecap: fell forward on the stairs and my knee caught the stair’s edge.  Most excruciating pain of my life.  I do not recommend breaking your patella.

• Broken foot: tripped on a box and landed directly on the side of my foot causing a spiral break.  It also might have happened because I was really excited to hear the song ‘212’ by Azealia Banks, but let’s go with the box.  This happened a week before I went to Florida, so I limped in a boot cast in pain around Disney and Universal Studios.

I’m a hypochondriac, and Google says I’m going to die.

Given my checkered history with health issues, I’ve let myself become something of a hypochondriac – nothing progressively severe, but I needlessly fret over my health.

Where did you get your medical license, Google?

After I got my wisdom teeth taken out, and the bleeding had not yet subsided and the blood clots were dislodging, Google told me that I was going to get dry sockets and be in severe pain.  When my foot was bruising badly after my trip over the box or ‘212,’ Google told me that I would need surgery and I would be facing pain for the rest of my life.  I was convinced I was going to die two summers ago when my bronchitis got worse before it got better, and that’s because Google told me so. Google is the worst when you’re sick.

Instinctively, the people around me warn me not to go on the Internet to look up my symptom because I psyche myself out and end up scared with every passing minute that I don’t get better.  It’s because of my paranoid nature that I get scared over health issues, and it’s my superstitious nature that has me knocking on my wooden bedside table constantly as I’ve been writing this.

Fingers crossed that this cold finds its way out, and soon!

The Order of Things (4D)

I love amusement parks.

Me at Disney World this summer. Happiest place ever.

I’ve been going to Canada’s Wonderland since I was a kid, and because I’m so tall, I was able to get away with riding coasters like Top Gun (or Flight Deck as it’s now legally named) when I was eight.  My parents have since fallen out of love with the place – my mom because she hates rides and my dad because he hates people – but I still go when I can.

My family always had a system of going through the park: we went in a counterclockwise rotation,  starting on the side with that old double looping Dragon Fyre and Drop Zone (or Drop Tower now) and ending on the side with The Great Canadian Minebuster and Top Gun – no, sorry, Flight Deck.  The park has changed over the years, but my system still is in affect.

Cue three years ago: one of the first times I went with my friends instead of my family.  Their hands all eagerly pawed at park maps and before long they started shouting in excitement about where they wanted to go first.  “Vortex!”  “No, let’s go straight to Behemoth!” “Let’s do the water park!”  And with that, I became a dictator.

It’s nonsensical to go to Behemoth first, it’s halfway across the park.  If we walk straight to Vortex, we skip over a handful of rides.  Why would we go to the water park in the morning when we can go there to cool off in the afternoon – which would also coincide with my counterclockwise pattern?  It’s all a matter of logic!

Imagine my delight when Dragon Fyre became the first ride of the day.  Success!

My Route:

Makes sense, no?

My Friends’ Route:

WHAT?

I’ve been cultured to go about amusement parks with this orderly system, because to me, it doesn’t make sense to walk all over the place and have to backtrack.  Even this past summer when I went to Disney Land and Universal Studious (oh my god The Wizarding World of Harry Potter!!!), my family and I went in a loop of the park, hitting each ride in a logical order on the path.

I take comfort with the familiar.

It’s one of my biggest OCD tendencies: the inability to deal with change and the refusal to deviate from what I find most comfortable.  Something as insignificant as what order to ride the rides at Wonderland is a big deal for me because I’ve accepted it as what works best for me.  I can’t let myself go out of my comfort zone and try something new.

That isn’t to say that I don’t realize the flaws in some of the things I so desperately need to have happen.  In that way, I’m a true Taurus.  I’m so stubborn it’s unbelievable.  It’s not so much about logic for me as it is maintaining a peaceful state of mind.  Even if the process is outdated or needlessly unnecessary, I stick to it because it’s what I know.  Sure, I can easily give in and make a bee line for the new roller coaster because I really want to ride it, but I can’t let myself be so spontaneous.

I’m too calculated to be spontaneous.

I Googled “spontaneous people” and got this. I am not one of these happy women.

As much as I crave order, I fear spontaneity.  I give credit to my best friends from elementary school because they’re the spontaneous type.  They spring an elaborate plan on you when they’re already sitting and waiting in your driveway.  It’s tough to deal with this uncertainty, but I try my hardest to be open-minded about going with the flow of things.

This speaks to the bigger picture – that is, I need control.  It’s why getting behind the wheel of a car scared me for years, and it’s why I assume a position of leadership in group projects and commandeer the majority of the work.  And again, that comes down to comfort: I’m at my most comfortable when I know every variable, possibility, and outcome.

It’s something I deal with.  I’ve gotten better with things, mainly because I’ve been forced to accept that – and excuse my cliché philosophical moment here – life is extremely unpredictable, and what happens happens.

But walking counterclockwise around Canada’s Wonderland keeps me at peace.

The Food Monster (3E)

Hamburgers are my favourite food. It wasn’t until recently that I discovered my insatiable constant craving of hamburgers, and that’s because I would simply refuse to eat them.  Not because they didn’t taste good, and not because they didn’t make my mouth water, but because whenever I ordered a hamburger at McDonald’s, it came with a side of hassle and with a regular sized drink of awkward.

The recipe for the perfect burger:

Perfect!

• Bun
• Burger
• Cheese, sometimes
• Bacon, always
• NO lettuce
• NO tomatoes
• NO onions
• NO pickles
• NO ketchup, NO mustard, NO relish, NO mayonnaise

I haven’t had a trip to McDonald’s yet where the worker hasn’t squinted at me with wariness after I ask them to make my sandwich plain.  And the times that my patty actually makes it to my hands plain?  Few.  More often than not I need to be that jerk who sends a perfectly fine hamburger back because it has lettuce on it.  I’ve tried eating it after removing all of the toppings to avoid being that jerk, but the mayonnaise has seeped into the bun.  It’s a lost cause.  There’s nothing I can do to save you, hamburger.

If you think my peril at McDonald’s is bad, think about Subway.

I love me some subs, but I was scared of going to Subway for the longest time because of my bare-boned choice of toppings.

The Matt Sub:

• Bread
• Cheese
• Chicken
• Bacon
• Hot sauce

There you have it.  A waste of money if I’ve ever seen one, to put meat and cheese on a foot-long bun.

I am a very picky eater.

WHAT IS THIS MESS?

I don’t like condiments.  I don’t like fruit.  I don’t like vegetables.  I don’t like overly complicated foods with multiple ingredients.

My pickiness comes from my fear of trying new things. It’s a wonder I like broccoli.  I was literally forced to try it.  Otherwise, I don’t venture much when it comes to food, mainly because I’m a very close-minded individual.

But I think my biggest problem is my inability to have foods touch. Thanksgiving is an ordeal for me, because I have to set up walls between my different foods so that my grandmother doesn’t drop a heap of mashed potatoes over my mound of rice – oh god, that thought makes me queasy.  And the gravy.  It seeps everywhere.  The thought of combining flavour, why, that’s positively alien
to me.  To me, food is meant to be enjoyed separately, and my rationale is that I like to enjoy each component’s flavour as they are.

It’s a wonder I can manage to eat a stir fry, but it’s a struggle.

Foods I Like:

I like my basics.

• I like a good breakfast of eggs and bacon and toast.
• I love all carbohydrates, the plain janes of the food pyramid: bread, crackers, rice, pasta (but never with tomato sauce because I don’t like tomatoes and I don’t like sauce.  I’m a bad Italian)
• I like all kinds of meat and fish.
• I like all junk food.
• I like potatoes, thank goodness, because they’re a staple to my meals whether mashed or baked or as greasy greasy French fries.

Foods I Don’t Like:

• EVERYTHING ELSE.

In the meantime I’ll stick to my Angus Third Pounders with just bacon and cheese, or my Oven Roasted Chicken foot-longs with bacon and hot sauce.

Plain, just the way I like it.

The Notebook (2E)

I mourn for these notes, needlessly defiled.

Twentieth Century American Literature is not an interesting enough class to pay attention to for two hours.  To stop myself from falling asleep my friend and I resort to good old fashioned note-passing.  She writes something in her margin, points, and laughs, and I laugh too, but I don’t write a response in my own margins.  Because I can’t.  Sometimes they might lean over to my page, and I tear my notebook away from the tip of their pen and snap at them.  The margins need to be left completely blank, or else the whole note is ruined.

It’s times like these where I think I have OCD.

The first notes of the year make me nervous.

It’s the first day of class.  You’re excited to start the new semester off on a good note (pun intended?).  You sit down in class.  You’re nervous, but what about?  Worried that you might not like the course, the professor, or the selected readings or marks breakdown?  Do you shift around uncomfortably because you don’t know anybody else in this class, and you’re too shy to strike up conversation with somebody new?  Or all of the above?  That’s the case for me, but these things barely matter: my biggest concern is with how I’m going to write my first class notes.

You might think that this isinsignificant, but it’s a big deal for me.  However I decide to write my notes in this first class is the benchmark for my note taking for the rest of the semester.  I can’t mess it up.  The thought of having a notebook full of mismatched notes is preposterous.  Everything needs to be neat, identical, and uniform.  It’s a weird habit, but it’s in line with my usual organizational compulsions.  If you were to come into my bedroom, it would be like stepping into an alphabetized and categorized heaven.

I treasure perfection.  The decisions I make on that first day ensure that the rest of the year will follow suit with cleanliness and crisp looking notes.  I’m often complimented on my penmanship and I’ve had many people tell me my notes look like they’ve been typed, and that nearly brings a tear to my eye.  Success!

What, then, is my formula?

The Notes:

• The title.  Should I write it all in capitals?  Should it be centered, or justified to the left?  What do I write as the title – the lecture number, or the title of the reading for the day, or both?  Do I write it on the very top line of the page, or on the second?

• The date.  Numbers and slashes, or words?  If words, do I write the day of the week, too, and if I do, do I write it in full or in short form?  And the month – long or short version?  Top left of the page, or top right?  If the title’s on the top line, the date has to share its space; if the title’s on the second line, the date gets the top line to itself.

• The bullets.  I always use point form, mostly; bullets, dashes, or dots?

• The keywords.  In red, obviously, to stand out, but in capital letters?  When I come to a second line for any given keyword definition, do I start writing at the margin or do I line up the start of the sentence with the end of the keyword above?

• The red pen.  When and where?

The Red Pen:

Oh, my red pen.

Ever since the seventh grade when my teacher made everyone use a red pen to underline the title and the date, I haven’t been able to part with red pens.  I’ve since abandoned that practice – I find underlining things to be messy because I can never muster a perfectly straight line.  Sometimes I write the title in red, or the date, and most times I write the course code in the top left corner in capital letters.

As good as the red pen is, it’s not a big enough superstar to scribe a note itself.  Always black.  Never blue.

The Margins:

NEVER TOUCH THE MARGINS.

The Finished Product:

Drumroll…

Perfection!

To my friends, my note taking habits are a bit of a mockery.  What usually follows my snapping at them is a quick strike and before I know it they’re smirking at the small black dashes they manage to get on my pages.  Little do they know, it isn’t really a victory.  I get to go home and recopy the notes and make them look even better.

So, ha.

Bump in the Night (1F)

Are You Afraid of the Dark? asked that TV show I watched after Goosebumps as a kid on YTV.  Well, the answer was yes, I was scared of the dark, thank you very much.  Today, that answer remains the same.

I hate staying up late.

I can’t believe this was a show for children.

I never stayed up late into the night until recently.  When I lived at home, I went to bed at ten because that’s when my parents went to bed.  The thought of being the only one awake in the whole house terrified me.  The distance between the TV room to my bed was too great, and if a murderer or the girl from The Ring decided to jump out from the dark, I’d be dead on the floor from panic before they would even get me with their knives or grimy little girl zombie fingers.

University gave me the opportunity to be the unproductive person up until two in the morning that I am today.  Why?  Because I can get from the light switch in my room to my bed with one giant Superman leap in the dark.

The dark makes uncomfortable.  It’s the breeding grounds for murderers and demons and spirits and every scary little girl from every scary movie on the face of the earth.  Turn the corner and boo, it’s the Ring girl and the Grudge lady and inthenameofthefatherthesonandtheholyspirit the girl from The Exorcist who – and I have never even seen The Exorcist – is so scary to me that I physically can’t look at a picture of her; she’s been the source of chronic nightmares since I was eight.  I know my fear of the dark is irrational, but once the lights are flicked off the scariest things my mind can conjure become manifestations in the shadows.

Mind you, I’m a very jumpy person.  I’m afraid of a lot of things.

Matt is afraid of:

• Snakes
• Clowns
• Murderers
• Loud noises
• Scar from The Lion King
• My basement
• Exorcisms
• Possessions
• American Horror Story
• Hauntings
• Poltergeists
• Nerdy girls who are the laughing stock of their high schools and are then humiliated at their high school proms by the popular kids who dump blood on her until she snaps and kills everyone with her telekinesis

Deep down, though, there’s a part of me that likes to be scared.  I willingly pay money to see horror movies in theaters because I like thrill.

I’m terrified of the unknown.

This is generally my reaction to horror movies, only I’m usually delirious from weeping.

What scares me most: the fear of the unknown, and of possibility.  The Blair Witch Project was downright terrifying to me because you never once see what’s chasing them for the entire movie, and you’re left to decide for yourself what it was that makes them scream in terror and eventually die.  What did I think it was?  The girl from The Exorcist, so you can only imagine that that made my viewing experience much worse.

The dark robs me of my most fundamental sense: sight.  And with my sight goes my security.  And with my lack of security comes my overactive imagination.  And in the dark, I rue my overactive imagination.  Creak!  Was it just the old house shifting, or is Jason Voorhees here for my head?  Scratch!  Branches at the window, or Freddy Krueger, so wake up wake up wake up!

To compensate for my lack of security, I take ridiculous measures.  For instance, at this very moment, I have the dead bolt on the door, the blinds drawn on the windows, the lights off but my lamp on, and I’m tucked under my covers clutching my teddy bear.  But open the bedroom door, flick off the lamp, or pull the covers down from over my head – darkness.  It’s inescapable.

What scares you?