greg.org: the making of: On Rotating The Dishes (via Kottke)
This mindset - wherein items owned may feel lonely or neglected because of favoritism toward other items or out of mere convenience - is the bane of my existence. It affects many many parts of my life from the simple list that of albums that I maintain assuring that I don’t listen to an album twice without listening to a number of other albums as well (whether I like them or not). You can forget about listening to single songs altogether; It is album or nothing. Only recently have I allowed back catalog items to slip off the playlist (with significant internal justification and debate) and yet there is a dark almost dirty desire in the back of my mind to start at ‘a.k.a I-D-I-O-T’ and move all the way through to ‘Zero’. This would of course mean that I couldn’t purchase any albums for the 52.2 days iTunes asserts that it would take me to listen to the almost 1800 albums in my collection. I also have no idea where albums that employ numerals at the beginning of their title would fall in this system. Do I put them at the beginning or the end? Or perhaps where they would appear if the name were spelled out as opposed to being numeric.
The music thing is on the mild side of the spectrum. At the other end of things, I have crafted a very complicated system of dressing and even purchasing clothes such that they rotate in an asynchronous fashion constantly getting assembled in what seems arbitrary and yet is very very intentional. The majority of my clothes are monochromatic and of fairly neutral tones. Shoes are black or brown as are belts. Socks are gray or brown. Everything rotates in rows or stacks of varying quantity such that the odds of any outfit recurring in short order is very low. In fact, I would guess that it is on the scale of maybe annually. Again, this doesn’t take into account items that get washed and any new purchases adding additional variation into the system. I suppose that to someone not in my head, this would seem to be very chaotic and disorderly. In fact it is all very well ordered and strictly regulated. This system of creating what is essentially the anti-outfit is all crafted with the ultimate goal of assuring that no item is neglected or ignored for too long and that no single article of clothing gets more than its fair share of attention or wear.
At the end of the day, friend, rest assured that I think this is crazy. I have sacrificed a little bit of my sanity to the point of obsession, in order to save the feelings of inanimate objects. I have no idea if this is some kind of innate thing within humans, as others clearly share this odd behavior to some degree or another, but it is certainly some kind of disability or evolutionary disorder, one that is deeply ingrained within the psyche and which overcoming is a significant struggle on the scale of conquering alcoholism or smoking.
