stuck in my brain

Don't you just hate when you get a song stuck in your head?

It just keeps looping around and round and you find yourself singing the words under your breath. Sometimes it's okay if it's a song you kinda like, but even then it can get a bit tedious after a while.

The worst is when it's so lodged in there you can't sleep cos you mind won't relax enough to stop it from looping the song endlessly over and over.

Maybe it's worse for me. I'm fairly sure I'm a bit OCD (Obessive Cumpulsive Disorder). I don't say that in an emo pity me sort of way, I just used to be really quite obsessive about things and occasionally still find myself utterly fixated.

I guess the best way to explain my particular thing was that it was to do with patterns.

Draw a small square with the tip of your finger on the palm of your hand. Right, now where did you start? It was probably at one of the corners, right? And you kept your finger constantly on the palm, rather than lifting it off to draw each side, right? What direction did you go in? Clockwise of anti-clockwise?

Well that's all perfectly normal. My problem was that, having drawn the square once starting at one corner, I would then have to redraw it starting at the other four corners. Sometimes I'd also have to redraw it four times starting at the different corners going in the opposite direction too.

If I didn't do this I would feel... odd. If I did do it, it would be, I dunno, pleasurable, I guess. Like finishing a good book or something - a pleasure in a sense of achievement.

Also, it wouldn't generally involve actually drawing the shape, just mentally picturing the action of drawing it. And the shapes were more complicated than squares, but not so complicated as to prevent their easy repetition.

It's not something I still do (nowadays I obsess over things like Civ3 for short periods - you may have noticed in previous blog entries) and it was probably not OCD, I was just reminded of it with this bloody song going round and round in my head like the patterns I used to draw.