This Must Change

Early last week, I thought it was a good time to rearrange the living room. I do this every once in a while, usually after a period of six months or so. I start to look around and think "the room has been this way forever, it's so unoriginal!" and decide that it must change--and soon. Rearranging a room does tend to be a spontaneous thing with me, and considering that it was last week that I first thought of moving the living room furniture, I'm sure you'll understand it when I tell you I was starting to go crazy. Come bed on Sunday night, all I could think about was how to rearrange the furniture, where the massive 8' couch would fit and how would I arrange the shelving for the entertainment center, and do we have enough art and other decorations to flesh out the space?

Okay, maybe you don't understand why exactly this would be driving me crazy; but how to explain it? I want to say it's because I'm obsessive-compulsive, but I've had people with "real OCD" get very mad at me for saying such. No, I don't wash my hands every 30 minutes, no, I don't get stressed and pull out my eyelashes. I don't even count steps (though I used to) or tap on desk lamps like Monk does (the quirky detective, not the wicked ropemaker). So why do I keep wanting to call myself obsessive-compulsive? Hmm, maybe it has something to do with the fact that I obsess over things unless I can (often compulsively) do them... "real" my ass...

Actually, in this modern age of their being a name for every perceived illness and miscontentment, the more appropriate term for my actions would be obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD). I know I've mentioned it here before, but I don't think I've ever painted a realistic picture of how much and how frequently these perfectionist habits confound me; my wanting to rearrange the living room is a prime example.

I woke up Monday morning and the day started off as usual. Well, not quite usual, as I usually don't have the mental energy to both head to the grocery store and start a load of laundry before Makal's even arrived at work. I knew it was going to be a good active day and that I would get much done. That night was the season premier of Heroes, and we were having some friends over to watch that and feast on beer and burritos. I don't remember how, or when, it started that day. I think I'd been contemplating where I would put my desk in the rearrangement, and was mentally sketching the furniture into the appropriate area to see if it would be functional. Then I got the bright idea to move my desk out so that I could arrange the cords nicely on the back of it. Then I decided to cut small sections out of the top of my desk so that I could feed cords through them and then along the back. And since my desk was out, I might as well shift it to be in the future location, just to see how it looks. But to see how it looked, I had to move over a piece of furniture that had been used in the entertainment center (just to make sure it would work by my computer). It was about here that I looked around at the living room, now in shambles with electronics everywhere and a very dirty floor, and realized that I'd gone too far. It was now 3 o'clock, people were arriving in two hours, Heroes was on in six, and I had neither a working TV nor space for people to sit. Bugger.

Of course, things worked out more or less okay. I got everything moved around before anyone arrived, and the first couple to arrive only had to deal with clutter for about 15 minutes, the next arrived as I was just beginning to reconnect the electronics, and things were pretty much complete by the time Makal arrived home. Most of this is thanks to coffee and my favourite techno playlist. ;) While that definitely wasn't the best time to rearrange the living room, boy did I feel better after.

Do I like being obsessive-compulsive about things like colour coordination or the way a group of pictures are arranged on a wall? Not really, it is the most annoying, distracting thing and leads to me starting projects that I never finish, or jumping in to projects larger than I should be taking on. Nevermind all the aspects of social interactions that I can turn my obsessive eye towards.

Since Monday was helpfully spent spontaneously moving furniture around, these past couple of days have been focused on the more decorative aspects of the room (a.k.a. all the stuff that isn't furniture, and probably doesn't have a function beyond looking nice). While my OCPD doesn't show up much in the mere arrangement of a room, it does come in mighty handy for the decoration process. The former is moreso a matter of creating functioning spacial relationships between the pieces of furniture, the latter combines space with visual organization, colour theory, the golden ratio, and practicality. A room is made in the details, the small accents that you probably don't notice on your first visual sweep but that you become amazed by the more time you spend in the room. The details are the fun parts. :)

Go ahead and scoff; many people think they can do just fine creating a styling room without being super perfectionist about it. Those are the people with plain white walls and furniture from Ikea.