Fun with O.C.D.

One of the best things about living at home is getting to spend tons of time with Christian.

My smile is awkward because I was desperately trying to get Christian to smile for the photo. No easy task.

I've become more immersed in Christian's world since I've come back home. His way of thinking, his priorities, his habits. We go to the gym together every morning. He proudly announces his calories burned after his hour on the treadmill. He is a good example.

Christian has O.C.D. Which means spaces in our house often have set-ups like this:

welcome to our world

Some of my friends say, "Oh, I'm so O.C.D. about this." No you're not. You WISH you had the dedication required to earn that label. You probably have neither the stamina nor patience to stick to your irrational beliefs. You've never eaten 12 bowels of cereal at a church YSA dinner because that number is "better". You've never threatened to hold your breath in protest because your older sister changed the picture settings on the TV. You've never drawn rows upon rows of little dots so that you could see what a thousand looks like. Christian has.Y'all are just frontin'.

Most of these obsessions are like a curse; but sometimes I think his dedication leads to interesting insights. For example, Christian's world, or the way he thinks the world should be, is just and fair. He had interesting opinions about Wikipedia's protest today (he uses Wikipedia daily). Christian has also been interested in divisions of time and space. So this book was a perfect Christmas gift for him:

Powers of ten - Charles Eames

Christian was excited to hear that this book was actually based on a short film that I watched in every science class I ever took. You may remember it:

Which then led us to this:

Isn't it great? I can't think about space and molecules for too long. It blows my mind. I tried to listen to Science Friday on NPR last week. Really fascinating stuff. I must admit, kind of went over my head, but cool none-the-less.

Thank goodness for Lawrence Krauss, my brother Christian, and other deep thinkers for tackling life's big questions so that I can spend more time looking up all the variations of "Sh*t _______ say". I guess the trend is over, but this one is pretty great:

And have you seen the Mormon one? That Stephen Jones, what a jokester.