It was all going so well

I have fallen back into bad habits. Not the eating thing, I messed that up already. No, this is the obsessive counting and listing thing that my brain does when I'm tired. I found myself counting my footsteps as I walked to work this morning, which I change when I walk on a different surface. I can walk on cracks within a particular type of surface but I have to try and avoid stepping on two types of surface at the same time. Nothing bad will happen, I'm not that crazy, but it will fuck up the counting, which isn't allowed. The worst thing is when I realise I'm doing it about halfway through and try and work out what I must have looked like as I take alternatively large and small steps trying to fit it in. And then, despite being conscious of it, keep doing it.

Basically it's a brain under stress thing. When I'm very ill or very tired, this is what it resorts to. When I had appendicitis (aged 12), I couldn't sleep and went through in anal detail things that I had just watched (Vice Versa and Abigail's Party) and listed the plots and characters' relationships to each other to a dizzying extent. It stopped making sense but I still kept listing. It explains my love for Japanese puzzles and pointless trivia about films at any rate - they're both ways of fitting my brain's need to count and make order into (mostly) acceptable forms. So the next time I annoy someone by listing all of the films that a particular actor has been in when you only needed one, please take a deep breath and try and think of me like a high-functioning Rain Man. I just can't help it. And if you harrass me about it I will hit my head with my hand and make braying noises. You have been warned.