I'm the Askew Police

Second Half of the New Year Day
National Tom Sawyer Days
UN International Day of Cooperatives
Anniversary - Battle of Gettysburg
Anniversary - First Postage Stamp
Anniversary - First US Zoo
Anniversary - Medicare
Anniversary - Zip Codes Inaugurated
Birthday - Diana, Princess of Wales
Canada Day (Canada)
Half-Year Day (China)
Independence Day (Burundi)
Independence Day (Rwanda)
Republic Day (Ghana)
Tour De France (France)

 

One of the clothes jobs came through! I got the job at Can I Offer You A Coke Classic Fashions because my mother, my aunt, and to a lesser extent 妹 are all frequent customers at this store, and the salesladies just love ’em.  Nepotism is definitely the way to go.

 

I seem to be really good with people.  I don’t know why, since often I am reclusive, but apparently I know exactly how to be sincere enough that people actually think I mean it.  (The thing is, that’s a good trait to be able to fake, and all the people I’ve worked for think I’m just a darn good actor.  But the thing with me is that I don’t really fake it. Even if I am not sincerely interested in your stories about your vacation, I sincerely care about your feelings and will thus listen politely because it’s obviously important to you.) It is not so much that I can be civil to people, it’s just that it’s part of the Rules that govern my obsessive-compulsive lifestyle.  I do not have a shoulder angel or devil. What I have on my shoulder is an iron-willed middle-management bureaucrat with an encyclopedic knowledge of all 27 volumes of Amelia’s Deep-Seated Rules Of Behavior, and that governs everything I do. I am not ethical or friendly, because those would imply a choice on my part.  Civility and good behavior are simply in The Rules, and I simply follow The Rules.

 

I have this theory that most people are obsessive-compulsive to a certain extent.  Everyone has a set of Rules that govern their behavior, Rules so deep-seated that they don’t even notice them.  Society wouldn’t work without at least a marginal amount of self-imposed Rules. But the problem is that nobody’s set of Rules is the same as anyone else’s.  Most people share a lot of the big Rules—the foundations of society. Some don’t and have an entirely different set—there are all sorts of possible reasons why—and this means that most of us think they’re crazy, like sociopaths or schizophrenics.  They have Rules, too, and often very strict ones, but their Rules counter the ones most of us share.

 

And then there are little Rules, too. Silly ones. Ones that are only rational because they are part of our innate need to have order and to find patterns.  Come on, admit it, you have some sort of special Rule for, say, how to eat an Oreo, or which brand of shampoo you use, or which seat you sit in in the car or in class, or which side you sleep on, or something equally pointless. You may or may not do this yourself, but I’m willing to bet you at least know several people who will arrange their M&Ms by color before eating them.

 

I think the degree of obsessive-compulsion in a person means the degree to which they must follow The Rules they set for themselves, and how much stock they put into each Rule. People who are less obsessive-compulsive—average people—can prioritize their Rules. But as you go up the OCD scale, you find that all of The Rules start to take on the same importance, so that on the farthest side the Coke Must Come In A Can Rule* is just as important to follow as the You Cannot Lie Rule.

 

I myself have more weird rules than the average person, I think—the closet door must be closed if I want to sleep, Earl Grey tea must go in the blue mug and Hibiscus Paradise in the green one, the letter J is ALWAYS PURPLE—and so I consider myself borderline obsessive-compulsive. I can counter it somewhat, though, and slightly prioritize these rules as rather less important than some of the others. But I still follow them all when I can, and I do feel better for it. This works for the civility thing, too, so that my motives for being polite have more to do with my own reward than with theirs.

 

At least this also means that I really like steaming clothes and getting all the wrinkles out. Which is good, since that’s a lot of what my job is. Haha! My shoulder bureaucrat is pleased!

 

 

*This is actually one of mine. Coca-Cola is only correct if it’s in an aluminum can.  Bottles or fountains are not where Coke should come from and I will refuse any sort that does not come in a big red can.

To Serve Man

I got another sci-fi cookbook!

 

My continued reference to ‘alien cookbooks’ makes me want to actually write an alien cookbook. I don’t believe it would fly as well as, say, Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook, but sometimes my brain wanders into the possibilities of how sentient aliens would cook, and how complicated it would get.* I have a nightmare sequence in one of my stories in which a former military commander dreams he is cooking dinner for a multispecies party (cooking being his new hobby), the dream suggesting that he finds this more stressful than commanding a fleet of battleships. The thing I like about science fiction is that there’s a lot of good story potential in simple stuff like this.

Speaking of alien creations, I never mentioned that Liz won this ‘contest’, I suppose you’d call it, with a doodle on the back of her Art and Gender coursebook (although I’m filing away the other doodles for future reference, since I steal alien ideas from everywhere and sometimes don’t even run them through the Giant Idea Eggbeater). She didn’t even know she was competing until she found a Post-It on the book saying “Can I have this when you’re done with the class? It’s The Hive!” If I had a scanner, I’d post it, but I don’t, so I’ll say that it looks like an antelope and a beetle had a successful hybrid. It’s on pink paper, but I have decided that its colors are black and gold, like a honeybee’s. It’s actually quite pretty.

 

And more weirdness.

 

*Note: I have not read The Galactic Gourmet, another of James White’s novels in which he tells the tale of a chef in the multispecies hospital. It may address this. All I can say is, DAMN YOU, JAMES WHITE!!