WildW's Blog

To start with, no, this isn’t a depressed existential crisis kind of a blog post, and I’m not pondering anything deep like the meaning of life. But it is about a peculiar feeling I get sometimes. (And yes, I just started a sentence with a conjunction. Twice.)

I was looking through my iPod, that contains my whole CD collection and a little more besides. I scrolled through the whole list of albums that I like, maybe a hundred of them, could decide on nothing I wanted to listen to and thought “Is that really all the music I like?”  Sometimes I decide I’m going to have a look through my music collection and see if there’s anything else I can put on to mix things up a bit, but it’s rare that I manage to find anything. Perhaps I am just old and beyond learning to love new things, especially when it comes to music. But there are worse things that seem even more limited – there will always be music that I haven’t heard yet, new or old, but some things are just crazy limited.

There are only about 8 or 9 colours. Seriously. Sure, my computer can display 16 million or so, but they are mostly all the same, more or less. Don’t believe me? Try plotting a graph with as many different series as you can, so that you can still tell them apart. White background, then you get black, red, green, blue, purple, orange, yellow, brown, maybe cyan. Any more and they start running together when you look at them. It’s a very odd feeling when you’re trying to plot this graph and you run out of colours. You start thinking, “I’m sure there were more colours than this.” But there aren’t. That song about rainbows that they taught you when you were 4 years old was right.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or OCD for short is, in its most severe form, an unpleasant and debilitating condition and mental illness, but in its common or garden form it is nothing but funny and stupid. Fortunately I have the latter kind – the kind that makes me want to alphabetize my CD collection and line things up in neat rows. This would be fine, and my girlfriend’s OCD would be fine too, except that they clash.

One of the most common symptoms of OCD like this is a fixation with numbers. Imagine some simple and pointless task. . . no, more pointless than that even. Think of how many times you knock on a door, or the number of times you wipe your feet. In this little mental game/disability, some numbers are good and some are bad. My good numbers have generally been 3, or 5. In my childhood I would find it hard to resist tapping most walls that I walked past. Even now, if I’ve nothing better to do and I find myself the passenger in a car, I’ll find myself tilting my head from side to side to avoid streetlamps. I guess that’s just my bored self playing a crude version of Pole Position.

Anyhow, one place where numbers certainly pop up is my girlfriend’s TV – more specifically, the volume control. You see, the volume on this TV is a number between zero and fifty – a number that the TV shows you whenever you adjust the volume. This number generally needs to be somewhere around halfway up the dial for comfortable listening. The trouble starts when the both of us are paying attention when the volume needs changing, and the negotiation begins.

There are some things we agree on of course. Neither of us would ever set the volume to 23 for instance, or 29. It would seem that prime numbers are right out. We still struggle to agree though, at times.

The programme we’re watching is quiet, and I turn up the volume a little from 20. . . 21,22,23,24. . . happy. I’ve gone up an even number, landed on an even number. !KLANG! goes a noise in her head.

“One more,” she says, urging me to pop it up to 25. “It has to be a round number.” I look her in the eyes and shake my head. She has a thing for the 5-times-table, and I would be happy to oblige her, but she wants me to stop on an odd number. I can’t do that.

“But Sweetheart, 24 has so many more integer factors than 25. Why, 25 is only divisible by 1 and 5. 24 has got 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 12.” She does not look impressed.

It is an odd affliction, but one I’ve noted in quite a number of people in the science and technology industries that I’ve worked in – and at least that makes me associate it with clever people. I figure it’s a sign of the very low-end of the autistic spectrum. In the end of course I give in, because I love her. Okay, so sometimes when she isn’t looking I’ll change a 30 up to a 32, but on the whole I let her win.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a geek in posession of some basic HTML must be in want of a web page. Please note that I’m trying to sound literate, and rather than having read Pride & Prejudice I have instead heard this quoted elsewhere a few times, most recently in an episode of Black Books. (Note that the post title is also a very very tenuous Monty Python quote.)  Also, I discovered that you don’t need to do a damned bit of HTML any more, you just install WordPress and be done with it.

I have a self-image to uphold, even if it truly is just for my own benefit. There are certain things that a proper geek, as I style myself, must do in life, or he is just not trying hard enough. Real geeks have their own web pages – and a proper geek runs his own email server. Well, I pay someone else to host it but, you get the picture. I have my own webcomic too, a place where I can gain some small succor through the attention of others. This blog on the other hand is likely to be read by nobody.

My ambition then for this small web-log is minor. Mostly it is an outlet for me to write prose – a skill that I occasionally feel the need to exercise. Also, typing feels good, and programming is so thought-intensive that you rarely get to do very much typing at a time. Writing is one of those things I like to do – I wish I could find the time for. I have a novel and a collection of short stories in my head that never seem to come out as well as they sound when I imagine them. Also I would like to be able to stop working and spend my entire time writing a couple of computer games that I thought of. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the love to spend my free time doing these sorts of things any more. Too much ironing to do.

One day I will afford my own place again, and I shall be able to have my friends visit me. I will be able to cook a pizza in my own kitchen after 10pm, and even watch the TV without headphones into the small hours. Ahh, bliss.