Ordinary Oddities

Last night, I watched an interesting documentary about kids with Tourette’s Syndrome. I’ve known two people with Tourette’s, one of whom is incredibly brilliant, and one of whom launched a baloney sausage across K-Mart because his girlfriend refused to buy it (which had less to do with Tourette’s, I think, and more to do with being kind of a dope).

Anyway, one of the most fascinating parts for me was about OCD, which is a big part of Tourette’s for the vast majority of those who have it. I’ve always had a collection of weird little OCD proclivities, though unfortunately none of the variety that would lend themselves to my house being tidy and spotless. Many of them were much more evident when I was a kid, like I had to eat everything in pairs. If I had 37 peas on my plate, the last pea had to be cut as exactly in half as was possible—no easy feat. Not eating the last pea was not an option, although if I ate only half of the peas, it didn’t matter, as long as the half I did eat was in pairs.

One of the more curious obsessions stemmed from my hating the feeling of my mouth being too wet. I hated feeling like I had a slobbery mouth, and I was incessantly running the inside of my upper lip across the edges of my teeth to rid it of wetness. This wasn’t a conscious habit, and it was only as I grew up that I realized the fixation was so manifest that prevention of slobbitude had led to all sorts of covert (even to me) behaviors. On long road trips, my mother and sister always had to stop to go to the bathroom; I never did. I was a camel. It wasn’t because of extraordinary bladder capacity, but because I existed in a constant state of dehydration, having made a subconscious connection between dehydration and having a dry mouth at a very young age. It was really only as an adult when several trips to the doctor over the course of a couple of years for various unrelated little things prompted comments about my dehydrated state that I started to figure out I had OCD-ed myself into a perpetual Saharan existence.

I still do weird counting things in my head all the time, or tracing the outlines of things with my gaze over and over and over. None of this happens on a conscious level; it’s always just running in the background as I go along about my business. I don’t even think about it much, but watching the Tourette’s documentary made me consider all these little idiosyncrasies, and how curious they are. Where do they come from…?

Perhaps the oddest thing about them is that they aren’t really all that unusual. I thought the wet mouth thing was about the weirdest quirk ever, but one of the kids in the documentary was talking about how saliva drives him crazy. Strange to find out that even at my most peculiar, there’s someone else who’s just like me.