Doing Things In An Orderly Fashion

The higher-than-usual intensity of the cooking at my house this summer springs from my determination to work my way through a stack of recipes I've photocopied or torn from various foodie sources over the past five years or so. And by "work my way through" I mean ACTUALLY COOK. Some misfiring synapse in my brain will not let me actually throw away any of these recipes until they have been attempted - a synapse which is probably nestled right in between the one that forces me to leave a single bite of food on every plate, and the one that won't let me wear brown shoes, ever, and somewhere in the neighborhood of the bit of DNA helix that makes me think that the cover of "Macarthur Park" by The Negro Problem is a work of genius.


So I have a compulsivity problem that manifests itself in certain things needing to be done a certain way, in a particular order, and that causes me a deep satisfaction when things are done to completion, preferably while following a set of numbered instructions. Like following recipes, or knitting sweaters, or engaging in the other great project of the summer: listening to every one of the currently 6,000+ (and growing!) songs on my iPod in alphabetical order, carefully curating and editing as I go along. This started about four days ago and we just listened to "All The Young Dudes" by Mott The Hoople, just to give you an idea of the magnitude of this Project. I feel like the guy who is carving the Crazyhorse statue must feel.


This is not the first time I've done something like this. As a kid, I used to listen to all of my cassettes in alphabetical order all the time, usually over the course of a rainy weekend, beginning with ABC and working my way through Huey Lewis and the News' "Sports" album and the Duran Duran oeuvre all the way to Weird Al Yankovic, who is to twelve-year-olds what Robert Benchley is to subscribers of the New Yorker. I don't know what compels me to do things like this, but they are enjoyable in an itch-scratching way that only fellow possessors of this urge can understand. It should come as no surprise, then, that my professional destination is the public library, where things are shelved according to a beautiful and time-honored system that, even though it was invented long before the advent of many of its subjects (computer science, skateboarding, hip-hop, string theory) is flexible and capacious enough to include them all and more every year. The library is a splendidly orderly place. The flip side of this is that if an item gets misplaced, it as much as winks out of existence entirely. Whoever said that matter can neither be created nor destroyed had obviously never encounterd a mis-shelved library book, which disappears as thoroughly as if it had dropped through a wormhole into another dimension. And that's all I have to say about that.