I am the worst blogger ever. As well as a potentially crazy person.

I haven't written a blog in FAR too long. 13 weeks to be precise. This will not do! I'm a bit worried that since it's been so long this particular entry will have to be the best blog ever written in the history of blogging.... I think it's unlikely that I'll be able to accomplish such a feat, so I'm afraid you'll have to make do with this.

I have come to the conclusion that I am at risk of becoming a crazy person. I was catching up on my House watching yesterday, and in typical House fashion he deduced from the patient's love of jigsaw puzzles that she had OCD (which obviously led him to a diagnosis of an incredibly rare genetic disease, thus explaining the whole bizarre array of symptoms. I love House).
Now, anyone who's seen the state of my bedroom will think that I'm the last person to have OCD tendencies. It's pretty rare to be able to see the carpet through the perpetually growing pile of clothes. But this particular episode of House got me thinking, and I have a fair few "quirks" that some might find strange....

I hate a messy cutlery drawer. All the spoons have to be in the spoon compartment, forks with the forks, knives with the knives. Not only that, but all the cutlery has to be facing the same way. It drives me crazy when forks or spoons are upside down (particularly forks - I can't stand it when the prongs get caught on each other). I think it's impossible for me to see a messy cutlery drawer without sorting it out, which one of my housemates is well aware of, and seems to enjoy wreaking cutlery havoc just to wind me up....

When I used to work at an old people's home, part of our job was to sort out all the washing up of the crockery after meal times. All the cups were stacked on a tray, and I used to hate it if the handles of the cups weren't all pointing in the same direction. Which did make logical sense, as it meant they would stack easier, although I'm not sure it was really necessary to make sure they were all at an angle of 45°. I don't think my co-workers were too happy about me wasting my time during one of the busiest times of the day arranging coffee cup handles.

A lot of my strange compulsions are number related, which is probably not surprising for a Mathematics student. The volume on my tv/laptop has to be even, or divisible by 5. If someone else is adjusting the volume and leaves it on a number that doesn't fulfil these requirements, I'll ask them to change it. Prime numbers are the worst - Boy quite often leaves the volume on my laptop as a prime just to wind me up. I find it absolutely impossible to sit still and watch something if I know the volume isn't on an acceptable number.

When I was younger I used to count the number of syllables in a sentence. My favourite sentences were those that had a syllable count divisible by 4. Again, primes = bad.

I find it absolutely impossible to walk up stairs without counting them. My family home is a Victorian terrace house, and I can tell you that there are 36 stairs in our house, in groups of 15, 3, 12 and 6. I love that all the sets are divisible by 3. Although the number of steps down to the cellar is 14 - it bothers me that this is not divisible by 3, however am placated by the fact that this brings the grand total to 50 - a nice round number if ever there was one.

When I'm at the gym, number of calories burnt has to be a multiple of 25. If I reached 303, I'd push it up to 325 even if my legs were about to fall off. I think even if my legs did fall off, I'd use my hands to get it up to an acceptable number before stopping to wonder why I'd suddenly experienced the loss of two limbs.


I've never really considered the potential crazyness of such behaviours before. And probably wouldn't have done, despite the House episode, if I hadn't watched a film last weekend called Proof. Anthony Hopkins stars as a brilliant mathematician, turned crazy person - in some ways similar to Russell Crowe's character in A Beautiful Mind. If films are to be believed (which of course they are, I can't wait for the day that we create dinosaurs from the stomach juices of trapped mosquitoes), then Mathematics leads to obsession with numbers (I'm pretty much already there) which leads to crazyness. I'm doomed.

When chatting to my aforementioned housemate about my inevitable decline into lunacy, we moved onto the subject of dreams - it always amazes me how incredible it is that our subconcious mind will manifest itself by making us experience and believe such unlikely, surreal or even impossible things whilst we're actually asleep in our beds.

My subconcious is a massive geek.

I dream about maths a lot. Mostly calculus, occasionally some matrices or trig. Whilst I was doing my A-levels I once dreamt the answer to a problem that I'd been struggling with for two days. Very exciting times when I woke up and realised my subconscious was a genius.

Dinosaurs crop up fairly often too. You know in Jurassic Park, that bit where they feed the raptors the cow, and the harness comes up mangled to f**k? I dreamt that there was a walkway in those trees, and there I was just casually strolling along when a nasty vicious I'm not even hungry I'm just gonna kill you because I can Velociraptor jumped onto the walkway behind me. I ran from the raptor, and found myself in a sort of laboratory type building, and came across an Allosaurus behind a glass screen. The Allosaurus apologised to me for the behaviour of the velociraptor, telling me "he was out of order - I can't believe he was so rude. I'll be having words later". Of course the Allosaurus had a Yorkshire accent.



Scary Velociraptors. Which actually look nothing like real Velociraptors.

 I've had at least 5 dreams where I've been a character in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Usually the slayer herself, although most recently I was Dawn - perhaps I was feeling particularly helpless that day? The night after that dream I dreamt I was in Hogwarts, which was being attacked by Voldemort and his army. I knew that I was the only one who could save the school, however I could only do so if I killed the Basilisk first. People kept trying to usher me to safety, no matter how much I screamed "BUT I HAVE TO KILL THE BASILISK!" at them. I'm not sure how I intended to kill the basilisk, as I only had a tiny vial of veritaserum on me and I'm pretty sure telling the truth isn't too effective against a giant serpent that can kill you with one glance.

Again, the night after, I dreamt about playing games on the bbc microcomputer that I had as a kid. They're pretty damn old, and most of you probably wont remember them. They looked like this:

Yup, that is a 5.25" floppy disk. Why my subconscious decided that it wanted to play pixelated computer games from the early 90's, I will never know.

Best case scenario: I am just a massive, albeit high-functioning, nerd, and will continue to maintain a normal social life.

Worst case scenario: I will fall further into the world of numbers, counting, and factorising, I will start to think that fantasy characters are real, perhaps believing that I am one of these characters. I'll start to speak in nothing other than binary code, or elvish, all the while becoming more and more fearful that I will be attacked and killed by a pack of genetically engineered Velociraptors, the likelihood of which will of course be indirectly correlated to the degree of order in the cutlery drawer.





Worst case scenario