obsessive compulsions

i am frustrated (again, and still). i am feeling like i'm not really going anywhere. i need some direction. plus my personal life is non-existent except for occasional three-am text messages to my phone (which i DO appreciate). so i don't know where to go from here but living at home is a little more difficult since i have become hopelessly addicted to msn waiting for Someone to become a deciding factor in my life. again, the cycle continues.

it was with these depressing thoughts that something ingenious occurred to me. yes, right now i am feeling depressed. but at this moment today, my ingenious idea was this: i know what could make me feel better (for a while)! i could, when i get home, take a notebook and glue in my obsessive-compulsive way all the little papers that are strewn about my room that i somehow cannot bring myself to throw out.

what i mean by obsessive-compulsive way is this: the little slips of paper, movie tickets, business cards, etc., no matter what their dimensions, will be arranged on the page along my imaginary straight lines. nothing will be pasted at an angle: all of these scraps have to be lined up along some straight line that runs through the pattern i will arrange. The first obvious straight line is the top of the page; some scraps will be put with their straight edges along this line (leaving of course a buffer area of space between the actual edges), but equally spaced from each other. the next obvious straight line is the left-hand edge of the scrap that is in the top left-hand corner, because i would never arrange an un-straight edge to run along the straight edge on the left of the paper. what is more tricky are the secondary straight lines. and, i don't always start with the top straight edge; i prefer to fit in everything piece by piece, yet still trying to line up everything along some line that i find somewhere.

i realized this in college: that whenever i encounter some kind of mess, i find it actually soothing to be able to arrange it following this inexplicable pattern of imaginary straight lines. i would come back from a hard day, maybe a few hours of studying electrodynamics, and i would really feel better after i arranged things like this with the items on my desk.

i know, it's crazy and it's complicated but it gives my mind some outlet, some real-life problem to solve, other than an imaginary amor imposible for which, in the lack of any other mental activity, i would find infinite ways to work out.