The food sort...er

Anyone who hasn't realised by now that the photos are pointless and rarely have anything to do with the blather du jour is probably pretty confused, don't you think?

Anyway.

I'm currently eating wine gums (a healthy lunch choice, I'm sure you'll agree) and of course I'm eating them in the right order.

I have to.

If I reached blindly into the bag instead of dumping a few onto the desk, I'd still have to eat them in the right order. Order by colour, and then order by the number of each colour. Everything has to be equally balanced, naturally.

Welcome to my OLF life.

I've been doing that since I can remember, to be honest. Anything like wine gums or jujubes or... well, pretty much anything in the candy realm that has specific colours (and especially if the colours correspond to specific flavours) should be eaten in a certain order. In a way it's good because it probably slows the eating process down a bit, but I'm the first to admit that it's not entirely normal.

Well, for you, probably. It's definitely entirely normal for me.

It shouldn't be surprising since it fits right in with my attraction to pattern and my need to catalogue, but sometimes it takes me a moment of sitting back and really watching what I'm doing to actually see that I'm doing it. I'm a food sorter. Not a compulsive one (the world won't end in a massive anxiety attack if the red gets eaten before the orange instead of the right way around), but a habitual one. When I'm eating peanuts I eat all the single halves before I go on to the intact ones. If I put potato chips on a plate I'll eat the broken ones before I touch the whole ones. And if I'm eating Terra Chips (I looove Terra Chips. Good thing they're expensive enough to make them a rare treat. Otherwise I think I could live on Terra Chips) the sorting could easily take all day if I let all my usual rules come into play. In that case I don't, though. Not generally. But if anyone's interested, ending up with only taro counts as a win...

Win. Interesting. Sometimes when I'm blathering on I accidentally hit on an idea that makes sense. Like I said above, this isn't a compulsive thing. I don't get uneasy if I don't have a chance to sort my food; it's just that I enjoy sorting it when I do have the chance. Maybe it really is a game. Maybe I'm just playing with my food to see if I can make things work out in just the right way so that the "best" thing is the last to go. That's not so bad, is it?

In the end it doesn't matter anyway, because I'm not likely to stop. And there you have it. I have to get back to work now, ok?



And, erm, eat the red ones...