Anal, I

I used to explain to people that I was only so organized because I was overcompensating for being disorganized. The only way for me to avoid complete and utter diarray, I'd say, was to be super-organized. Actually, I'm not really super-organized. And anyway, I was wrong.

Last weekend, we went to my aunt's new house to celebrate various birthdays, retirements and movings. The younger kids (nephew, niece, and cousin's offspring) had a bunch of toys out, and I got interested in the little plastic dinousaurs (complete with little plastic cavemen). After a few minutes my cousin and my sister began to laugh at me. I'd scooped up all the dinosaurs onto the lid of a plastic container, and had sorted them by type (and colour too, I think). "I just wanted to see how many different kinds there were," I protested. But looking at the neat array of dinosaur species in my lap, I had to admit I'm maybe a little anal. (And I also remembered the time I was eating M&Ms during a break in class once, not so long ago. The prof and several classmates made comment on the fact that I'd sorted them all by colour and had arranged them in long lines--each line a colour--on the desk. Arranged, that is, according to the spectrum of visible light. Somebody said something about indications of mental state . . . )