Perfection, Not Progress

Let's talk some more about me, The B-Man. I can only assume that everyone is as fascinated by me as I am.

I am by nature, nurture, and inclination a clean freak and obsessive organizer. Some people would call me a little fussy. Well, all people actually, but what do I care? Wait, I'm a people pleaser. I do care! I do care! My good friends, however, call me prissy, not being overly concerned with hurting my feelings.

I think I've gotten better at releasing my iron grip on my environment, but not much. I think I've progressed from a state of dangerous mental pathology and been reborn as a mild obsessive. And just because I think I've gotten better doesn't mean I have actually gotten better. I think many thoughts and wear reality like a loose garment.



SuperK, always the normal one in our relationship, tolerates this, sometimes. She is more of a Chaos Manager. Consider our offices. Mine appears to have been sanitized then abandoned for many years. No one could possibly work in that sterile space. SuperK apparently likes to host violent demonstrations in her office. Strangely enough, she can find things more quickly in her chaos than I can in my clean room. I make a file, label it, file it away, then forget where I put it. I fall back on my favorite excuse: Too much LSD in college. She rummages through one of her teetering piles and quickly retrieves whatever it is that she's looking for.

When I enter our house, I head for the closet and hang up my coat. Sometimes I organize the closet. SuperK drops her coat on the closest available surface, as quickly as possible. This annoys me, so I put her coat away, which annoys her, especially since I often forget where I put it, a problem that I recently alluded to. She can't seem to put things where I want her to put them and I can't seem to stop hiding them from both of us. Sometimes I put things away before she has a chance to use them. She'll take some pickles out of the fridge and I'll put them away when she turns her back to get a fork. I don't even know I'm doing it.

I experimented with all kinds of techniques to get her to change to my specifications. Back to the coat conundrum. For a long time, I grabbed her coat and hung it up, muttering in annoyance. Then I migrated to my favorite state of mind: passive aggressive. I still hung up the coat but tried my best through various swearing and huffings and defensive body postures to will her to see how irritated I was. Sometimes I'd throw her coat on the floor of the closet. None of these methods worked for long.

Finally, I decided to just ask her to hang up her coat instead of requiring that she read my mind. Even I don't know what's going on up there, and it's my mind. It's in an ancient language long vanished from this veil of tears. She listened sympathetically and, for a while, hung up her coat, sometimes, which was almost as bad as never hanging it up. It's not that important to her and it's not my right to ask other people to adopt my standards of behavior.


You know what? Who gives a shit, really? Why would I spend all of my precious irritation time on a coat on a chair? There are so many people and institutions and circumstances that irritate me. I need to save my energy for them.

Perfection, not progress.