Another "only with OCD" photo. How amazing is this! Not only matching the background in color, but to have landed just right so the color boundary exactly matches the sidewalk tiles' grout lines (I didn't touch it, honest)! Flounders and octopuses have nothing on this cone. I swear I sometimes feel almost like one of those autistic savants who see math or can listen to a song once and play it on the piano -- only with "environmental visuals", if that's a phrase😁
Related posts: camouflage
"Power in the Blood"*, I mean "Power of the Cross"^
Actually, another one from the OCD Guy walking around with a camera.
Just walking along, looking at everything but where I'm going, and spotted this. Got my obsessive-compulsive disorder and/or the suspected high-functioning autism to "thank" for this discovery.
I came across this photo while perusing an old folder. Remembering that I considered posting it at one point, I half-convinced myself that I must have, but after checking past posts under a bunch of keywords I decided I never did.
What struck me at the time was the stand-out redness of the chair and the fire extinguishers in an otherwise dull, colorless alley. That, and of course, the fact the chair was crammed upside-down between the ladder and the wall. I "credit" my OCD for forcing me to glean out all sorts of relationships between things that don't normally have anything to do with each other -- one might say it's something along the lines of, seeing meaningfulness in an acausal synchronicity -- and the meaning I see here is the very opposite; a visual metaphore for meaninglessness.
Consider: the function of a chair is to provide a stable platform as it rests on a floor or on the ground -- it loses its meaning when, absurdly, it has been turned upside down several feet off the ground. Likewise, the four fire extinguishers huddled under it behind the ladder seem almost as if they had been deliberately stowed away in a troublesome location out in an alley, when they should be in readily accessible spots indoors. I note also that the ladder has been rendered unfunctional by having a metal plate spot-welded in its bottom portion.
The chair, the fire extinguishers and the ladder -- all three elements here have been deprived of meaning individually, but ironically that is what invests them with a collective, desultory meaning of self-abnegation.
More could be said, but perhaps a rare, rational measure of self-restraint is called for here.
Being OC and a photobug means being forced to expend a lot of mental energy (and often varying amounts of physical energy as well) doing this sort of thing every day.
They were accidentally juxtaposed by a trick of the perspective... but once I noticed them I had to impose order on their randomness. The order called "parallax".
A couple weeks or so ago, I saw a video online that purports to show that "only Japanese people do this", that this being how Japanese people make chopstick rests out of the chopstick covers while waiting for their food to arrive in resturants. I just went back and found the video, and took a couple of screenshots to show what the thing is supposed to look like.
Now, after my intial watch of the video I was of half a mind to post a comment in rebuttal of the claim that this is exclusively a Japanese practice -- because I am Korean-American, not Japanese, and yet I started doing this very thing many years ago without ever having heard of the practice. Most Koreans, indeed most people I think -- those that even cared, that is -- would simply place their chopsticks flat on napkins. I'd even wager there are a lot of people who simply would not care enough to put anything under their chopsticks, at least before the food arrived; once the meal started, even these slobs probably would use their plates as chopstick rests.
Since no one had ever taught me to do this, my design of the chopstick rest unsurprisingly went through trial-and-error stages as I improved on the initial concept, which was identical to the "base model" shown in the photos above. I went and dug up my old posts about it, and here I reproduce the different models developed over a number of restaurant meals.
No. 1 (identical to the Japanese one in the video) I decided was inadequate because it was too easy for the chopsticks to slide off the sides, as there were no guards. No. 2, I rejected as being too clumsy and ungainly, even though it was safer due to the dip in the middle. No. 3 was the elegant compromise I finally arrived at -- slim, yet secure.
Interesting, in view of the fact that DNA analysis shows that I am genetically more or less equal parts Korean and Japanese. A bit of a surprise -- a revelation(?) -- there; was it my Japanese side unconsciously directing me to make origami chopstick rests because it's something that's imprinted in the Japanese psyche? Why else would I spontaneously start folding them without ever having heard of them? Is it racial memory? [but how long would the Japanese have been doing this for -- after all, waribashi in mass-produced paper envelopes cannot have been around all that long...] Or is it some kind of "Morphic resonance" in human brains?^
O.K., it's probably nothing more than an accident, especially in view of the fact that I'm a recovering OCD sufferer who is very particular about contact hygiene (I figure anonymous chopstick covers straight from the factory should be marginally cleaner, at least where germs are concerned, than a restaurant tabletop), but it's fun to speculate...
Related posts: A Little Design Project
to bother with, said the eagle-eyed OCD man.
Related posts: Where Heaven And Earth Touch; Where Heaven And Earth Touch II; Cloud-Struck Tree
I was just walking along, down a neighborhood alley I'd traversed before, when I noticed this unusual reflection that just happened to neatly "string the pearl" with that hole in the wall (hah, for once the expression is meant literally). If I had come along just a little earlier or later it would have "missed the target". I couldn't see what was reflecting the afternoon sun so fortuitously, as the source was beyond a wall.
Yeah, it's all about "snapping to"... which is ironic, given that my idea of hell is restriction of freedom, both physical and mental, but mainly physical. Which is why I'm deathly afraid of being buried alive -- and of that condition being carried over into the afterlife.
Give a man with obsessive-compulsive disorder a camera, and this is what he shoots.
...who also happens to be very interested in camouflage. I saw this out the bus window and couldn't resist. I barely had time to click off a shot before the bus took off again.
Related posts: Almost As Soon As I Exited The Subway Station,; Disappearing Trick; Yet Another Vanishing Building; Being Invisible; Another Vanishing Building; A Chameleonic Monster Has Been Living On My Desk
EDIT: I've got music playing on the computer, and just now, as I typed "coincidence" in the Labels section, Duran Duran sang "...coincidence" in their song "Ordinary World". What a coincidence :D
As I explained in the November 6th, 2011 post, I developed a serious case of obsessive-compulsive disorder as a child. I believe it was triggered by the sudden anxiety I experienced when I woke up on New Year's Day morning and found that my parents had left me to go and visit my paternal grandmother in Daegu, which was hours away by train -- and of course, to a young child that might as well be on another continent. The feeling of panic that overwhelmed me was absolutely crushing; my parents hadn't prepared me by informing me beforehand of their plans. But to be fair to mom and dad, I guess they really can't be expected to have foreseen the severity of my reaction to their sudden absence; after all, by the age of ten the average boy probably would have faced it in a more pedestrian manner. So. Well. Except, I wasn't average -- at that stage in my life I was a sickly, delicate child (I remember my father's MD friend coming over to diagnose me and give me a shot -- yes, doctors still made house calls back in those days), less emotionally developed than my peers and highly dependent. I felt scared, vulnerable and abandoned. If someone could have seen my aura at the peak of my pediatric trauma they might have seen something like this:
You know -- emergency-red inside, all het up and hopped up, and not in a good way, and the world outside all jumbly unthinkable darkness; but still all locked in and unable to act out because of all the, well, all the societal rules and boundaries -- appearance and propriety still mattered, especially when you're a child and a "good boy" in Asia. Anyway, that's kind of how the inner me felt at the time.
But of course, over the years I managed to grow out of all that by and by. Albeit not completely (perhaps you can see traces of it in this blog?); I still feel moderate twinges of it and I just have to obey the sudden irrational impulses that are apt to overtake me at unpredictable moments every day. I guess at those moments I might impress third party observers -- if any happened to be watching -- as "slightly eccentric" or something along those lines.
I suppose the above image could also serve as a visualization of mental illness in general; the medical encyclopedia (the one with the forensic medicine section authored by my grandfather) wherein I found my symptoms described also stated that in extreme cases OCD can be virtually indistinguishable from schizophrenia.
I needed to visit Insadong again today, and happened to pass by that shop where I bought the catfish paperweight Saturday. I checked to see if the proprietor had rearranged the remaining three catfish to make them chase each other's tails again.
Yes, he had.
Which set me to thinking and worrying -- what about the next time somebody buys another of the catfish? How will the proprietor deal with having just two left? How will he arrange them? I mean, obviously he could place them side by side, head to tail, and that could be seen as the fish chasing each other, but it's also conceivable that some people will see them as swimming past each other, like ships in the night or the stars in the cosmos forever growing apart, rather than being united in a yin/yang-like whole. Oh, what will he do, what is he to do?
Related post: My Latest Acquisition
I took a casual look as I walked past, then just had to go back and do this:
And here's a previously unused shot, as a bonus:
[More than likely, this has been known for a long time, but hey, at least I re-discovered it on my own^]
I've noticed something fun about the nine o'clock hour. Take any random minute of the hour -- say 9:23. If you add the digits of the minutes together, numerology-style, the sum is 2+3=5. Add the sum to the hour 9, and you get 9+5=14. Add the digits of that sum together, 1+4, and the resulting sum is identical to the sum of the minute digits, 5. Works for every minute of the nine o'clock hour. Take 9:43, for another example. 4+3=7. 9+7 yields 16, and again, 1 and 6 add up to 7.
If the sum of the minute digits exceeds 10, add up the digits of that sum again, and that secondary sum will work the same. For example, with 9:57 you have 5+7=12, exceeding 10, so add the digits up again: 1+2=3. Then add the hour 9, and voila, you have 9+3=12!
And if you don't add up the digits of the 10+ minute sum (12 in this case), interestingly enough, this happens: 9+12=21, add the digits of that sum together, and you have 2+1=3, which is the same as the sum of the original minute digits: 5+7=12, and 1+2=3!
The things you notice when you suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and have to look at every little thing twice, just to make sure you saw it.
I was just walking by when I happened to notice something truly odd. This little trickle of water (or whatever it was) -- it looked exactly as if it had set out to flow downstream, in a perfectly ordinary, uniform manner, but then suddenly decided to duck below the surface of the road for a spell, as if that section of the pavement were something like a blanket, before re-emerging and pooling at the end.
Like I said, "What the heck?"
