Preface
All my life I have been one of those people obsessed with order. Even when life doesn’t have any order I must find the pattern in it. This has never been truer in my life then in two areas: food and relationships.
In the food area I am not that unique from other people. Each culinary celebration must go in the order that they were intended. First there is breakfast. This has always been a hard area for me as I have never been big on breakfast foods. I don’t like eggs or bacon or even pop tarts. They have just never been things that I want to start out my day eating. When I do find something that I want to eat that is a breakfast food I get overjoyed for it is rare. Next is lunch. This above every other eating occasion is my favorite because it has the least restrictions. It seems the world is open to me. Not just the world of food but every part of life seems accessible at lunch. Obligation. That is what fills dinner. When you have dinner alone (of which I do often) you always feel as though you should be having it with someone, anyone, as long as you are not by yourself. On the other end if you do eat with someone there seems to be all of these unspoken rules of what dinner should be. No matter who you eat with people expect for dinner to be this wonderful wrap-up to the day or the beginning of something wonderful. I like eating dinner alone so it can be neither of these things and I won’t feel guilty about it.
Just as I must have meals in a sequential order so must all of my relationships. It doesn’t matter what kind of relationship it is, as long as it ends in “ship” it has a line of order that must not be tempered with. I found this out when my friend Paul told me; with all of our other friends around, that one day he was going to marry me. Even in fourth grade I knew that this was not the logical order that this should go in. Not that I was opposed to the idea, I just wanted it to follow the script that I had built up from hearing love stories and watching romantic comedies with my mom. Many other relationships followed after but all of the plutonic kind. Through out high school and college I convinced myself that it was good that I didn’t date because it would be too hard for someone to follow my insane need for order. People these days were fast and I liked things to go slower. I filled my time with other things to help me not think about what I was missing out on.
My continued diversions worked for a long time. I found out how good I was at keeping the order even when it meant that I had to give up certain human emotions and run on auto-pilot. Surly this was an ok way to go through life. I had gotten my life in good order by the time I was twenty one. I didn’t smoke or drink so I never had to worry about how that could disrupt my life. I got through school with little problem. Once I was out I went to work and came home. Occasionally I would go out with friends but mostly they were all busy with family stuff and so meetings had to be strictly scheduled which I always liked.
All my life I have been one of those people obsessed with order. Even when life doesn’t have any order I must find the pattern in it. This has never been truer in my life then in two areas: food and relationships.
In the food area I am not that unique from other people. Each culinary celebration must go in the order that they were intended. First there is breakfast. This has always been a hard area for me as I have never been big on breakfast foods. I don’t like eggs or bacon or even pop tarts. They have just never been things that I want to start out my day eating. When I do find something that I want to eat that is a breakfast food I get overjoyed for it is rare. Next is lunch. This above every other eating occasion is my favorite because it has the least restrictions. It seems the world is open to me. Not just the world of food but every part of life seems accessible at lunch. Obligation. That is what fills dinner. When you have dinner alone (of which I do often) you always feel as though you should be having it with someone, anyone, as long as you are not by yourself. On the other end if you do eat with someone there seems to be all of these unspoken rules of what dinner should be. No matter who you eat with people expect for dinner to be this wonderful wrap-up to the day or the beginning of something wonderful. I like eating dinner alone so it can be neither of these things and I won’t feel guilty about it.
Just as I must have meals in a sequential order so must all of my relationships. It doesn’t matter what kind of relationship it is, as long as it ends in “ship” it has a line of order that must not be tempered with. I found this out when my friend Paul told me; with all of our other friends around, that one day he was going to marry me. Even in fourth grade I knew that this was not the logical order that this should go in. Not that I was opposed to the idea, I just wanted it to follow the script that I had built up from hearing love stories and watching romantic comedies with my mom. Many other relationships followed after but all of the plutonic kind. Through out high school and college I convinced myself that it was good that I didn’t date because it would be too hard for someone to follow my insane need for order. People these days were fast and I liked things to go slower. I filled my time with other things to help me not think about what I was missing out on.
My continued diversions worked for a long time. I found out how good I was at keeping the order even when it meant that I had to give up certain human emotions and run on auto-pilot. Surly this was an ok way to go through life. I had gotten my life in good order by the time I was twenty one. I didn’t smoke or drink so I never had to worry about how that could disrupt my life. I got through school with little problem. Once I was out I went to work and came home. Occasionally I would go out with friends but mostly they were all busy with family stuff and so meetings had to be strictly scheduled which I always liked.
All of this worked really well for me to distract from the relationships that I was not having…until one day I could be distracted no longer.
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