The Anal Retentive Crayon Box

            My dad is anal retentive. Any time he comes to visit me I panic and make sure to clean before he arrives. I’ve noticed that most people have this reaction to their mother coming over to their home, and they work themselves into a frenzy because she is going to think the place is a pigsty. This is not the case in my family as my mom knows that I am a slob and has accepted it, but since my dad is anal retentive about almost everything he can’t comprehend my organized chaos. I know where everything is, and I often get confused if I try to put things ‘away’. Once I spent a frustrated hour looking for a can of polyurethane, which I put ‘away’ because I finally decided that sitting on top of the microwave was not an appropriate place for it. I found the polyurethane accidentally, in a place that is semi-appropriate to store something like that, but it was missing for a year. In my mind it should be sitting on top of the microwave though.

            Since my dad is so completely anal retentive he assumes that I am disorganized in everything, although if he had paid closer attention to me as a child he would have realized where my anal retentive tendencies prevail, and what type of career path I would choose.

            There are two types of children. The first is the child that receives their new box of crayons for the school year and doesn’t think about it. The second immediately opens the box and has to rearrange the crayons into a more pleasing color array. I am the second type of child; I had to change the order to a gradating spectrum (I would have called it ‘rainbow order’ at that age) so that the reds amalgamated perfectly into the oranges and so on and so forth.

            By the time I was six years old (I started school when I was two) I wanted to keep my art supplies in pristine condition. If a fellow classmate asked to borrow my markers I would qualify them first (really, what had they done to THEIR markers that they had to use mine?) I would make sure that they knew not to use the yellow marker over a darker color that would then contaminate and taint the felt tip to my precious sun yellow. Obviously the black marker was a detailing item that should be used last to outline the finished picture, and not colored over to ruin the tips of the remaining seven makers in my Crayola set, which would look new until the last day of school.

            I was fastidious about art materials and if they were tainted in any way I didn’t want to use them. It horrified me to go to a friend’s house and have a plastic container full of crayons thrust upon me for my drawing enjoyment. If the crayons had their wrappers peeled away because they had been sharpened I didn’t really want to use them anymore, and the thought of using a broken crayon was too much to bear. What happened to the box anyway, weren’t you being nice to it? How was I supposed to find the color I wanted if they weren’t in order?

            I’ve grown up a bit and my anal retentive tendencies have grown with me. The toolbox in which I keep my oil paints is in the same general state of my crayon box. (Strange enough as it is the tendency doesn’t translate across the board; I hate acrylic paints and therefore throw them haphazardly into a bucket that has been shoved into the back of my closet.) All my oil paints are in spectrum order, and inside of each color wavelength the paints are in alphabetical order; on top of that each tube is placed head to tail so that they sit perfectly in the toolbox. In art school I still qualified people if they needed to borrow a color from me; I would ask them to squeeze from the end of the tube. Hey, some of those paints cost a lot of money and I was in art school, which meant that I was poor because that was also part of the curriculum; poverty for artists and how not to starve.

            It isn’t just art supplies, its books, music, movies, the contents of my fridge and the magnetic poetry on my fridge (how else am I supposed to find words unless they are in alphabetical order?) However since my clothes can be lying on the floor and my couch can be covered in animal fur my father thinks that I am not anal retentive. The one area that my dad is not anal retentive, but which I am is a source of enjoyment for me, so I have pointed out to him that just because something is a pickle doesn’t mean that it can grow mold and live in the fridge for five years.