642-8: Describe in Detail the Most Boring Thing Imaginable

Alphabetising music, movie and tv collections, counting fruit as it's cut to ensure an even number of pieces and the need for colour order and neat patterns are all special quirks that are just part of being me.

It’s the neat, orderly, frustrating freak streak that it sounds like.

This story is about one of the most boring things you could think to write about, hanging out the washing… but when you have a need for colour, colour and order, hanging washing, cleaning my room and even putting my clean undies away - they can all be hilarious entertainment for others to watch.

T-shirts must be fastidiously folded, clustered by colour and arranged in tones and shades, darkest to lightest. If my baby blue Grover t-shirt is mixed up, propped next to the dark blue Star Trek tee.. for just a moment, contemplating the cruelness, the world stops..Socks can only be ordered by pattern. The mad mashup of colour and movement that are HappySocks makes any other order impossible. You have to understand, it's utterly bewildering when the blue, black and orange argyles are staring at me from between the multi coloured party of polka dots. Recovering from the ataxia takes a breathe and a befuddled scratch of my designer stubble.The same ocd crazed colour & pattern tenets are also at work with the leather, drag and Sunday best hanging behind the mirrored wardrobe.While this ocd crazy makes everything easier to find (though not preventing the classic clothing crisis that happens every time i leave the house) it does leave my wardrobe looking like the set of Gumby.

Bright, mostly primary colours splash out me at screaming, "wear me, i'm amazing".

Of course even my obsessive little quirks spark up on the gayer side.Hanging washing is where it really gets amusing. It always starts fairly innocently… the pegs holding up my Justice League of America t-shirt just have to match (let's say they both have to be a matching white). They also have to be a different colour to the pegs on my Green Lantern pants hanging to the left (say, matching green pegs) and the dusty pink shorty shorts on the right (matching red pegs sound ok?) ... follow this and a pattern organically forms... and then it descends into madness.I bet you didn't know there are a great behemoth of choices when it comes to hanging your freshly unblemished undies.

Actually there's more than you can possibly imagine. As I peg my dripping wet, freshly spun pants to the line the need pops into consciousness with a fun loving, hell raising little smirk and a sparkle in the eye.

When hanging clothes some of the rules and needs I can be bound by are:

All items of the same colour must have the same colour peg - fair enough, thats pretty easy and reasonably normal

Colours must be hung in neat and tidy lines - it's a bit picky for such a temporary installation that no one sees but sure, ok...

Clothes can’t be inside out and all must face the same direction ( eg fronts of tshirts, trousers, pants, singlets etc must all face away from the house, toward the garden etc) - wow, dude... you need help

Clothes need be hung in an alternating colour order on alternating lines.( It looks chaotic until you see the pattern in the detail.) - oh ok...wait, what the fuck? Confused? It goes something like this....lines 1 & 3 - clothes are hung in the order red, blue, green, white, black .lines 2 & 4 - hang in reverse order. black, white, green, blue, red. WTF? no, actually... WTF Are you mad? (yes, of course I am)

Wait, which order do they go in again? What is the this dumbfuckery I deal myself into?.

It’s actually fucking amazing the washing isn’t dry by the time it’s all hung.

The truth is though, obsessive and out of control as my burning needs are, boring is never dull and there's method in the madness. The most mundane things, like hanging washed clothes & putting away the crisp, now fresh and untainted wares starts to feel like a game of 'go fish', played with UNO cards.... and having Whitney Houston deal from the deck. You just hope you can remember whether the "lemon zest" Sesame Street tee that you're folding is a shade lighter or darker than the Stay Dench shirt you bought last week that was helpfully described as "yellow".

As for the method in this madness, it's never more obvious or useful than when a surprise catches you off guard. Need to find the royal blue sports jockstrap and the dark & baby blue football shorts to keep the order... NOW....

A quick few switches to make everything match and off I go. It's the most amazingly ridiculous stuff you'll ever see.