For those of you that don’t know me (or that don’t know me *well*), you might not know that I have Asperger’s Syndrome, and many OCD tendencies.
One way in which the OCD has manifested itself is that when I get a container of some type of mixed food products – such as M&M’s or Chex Mix, I have to separate or sort the contents. M&M’s get separated by color; Chex Mix or similar must get separated into the component ingredients – all the pretzels together, the toast pieces, the Chex, the peanuts, and so on.
This is never much more than a nuisance, and a source of amusement to others, and sometimes even to myself.
However, lately some of these symptoms seem to be loosening their hold on me.
And today, I discovered a way around the M&M sorting issue… If the M&M’s are in an opaque container, such as one of the bags they often come in, and I am able to release a single M&M or possibly two at a time, there is nothing to sort, and thus, no issue.
Just to round out the picture, the normal process for me is to dump them all on a containing surface (such as a paper plate), sort them by color, and then consume them in order from lowest quantity per color group to highest quantity per color group. There is no preference for the order of the color in a tie of quantity. Nonetheless, green are my favorite. I know they all taste the same, but green is more pleasing to me than all the others.
Tags: Asperger's, OCD
July 30, 2010 at 1:34 pm |
I also separate m&m’s by color. I find them to be “smoother” when I do. The mind is an interesting thing.
~LeMorgon
August 19, 2010 at 7:34 pm |
I used to do the same thing as a kid with Capt Crunch’s Crunchberries. I’d go through an entire box and separate the ‘berries’ from the regular Capt Crunch. Of course, Quaker came up with ‘Just Crunchberries’ after I grew up and didn’t care anymore. Nowadays, I separate m&m’s and Skittles.