We all have our own “unusual preoccupations or rituals.” I often joke that I have OCD but none of my quirks stem from the need to offset anxiety. I just do them because I am odd. I noticed one such quirk this morning as I was getting dressed.

SocksIt is how I pick my socks. I have a drawer full of socks and they are not stored in any order. I simply dump the entire load of socks into a drawer. I have probably 20 pair of ankle high socks. Several pair are pushing five years old. They do not have holes but over the years the fabric has become very thin. I have about 10 pair of socks that are less than a year old. The fabric is much softer and they are not as dingy. The one easily distinguishing mark is that the newer socks have an orange stitching on the inside of the elastic band.

So every morning, I will dig through the entire drawer attempting to find two socks with orange stitching. When I am done, I also have a stack of reject socks. This process takes much longer on the mornings when I should have done laundry the day before. I end up with one acceptable sock and a pile of rejects. Now it would be unacceptable to mix the good sock with an old sock, so I drop the good sock and try to find two passable second-class socks.

Now good sense would tell me to either give away the old socks or throw them away so I would only have socks with orange stitching. But I don’t. I’m usually in a hurry in the mornings. When I get home in the evenings, I don’t think about my obsession . So until I do something about this situation, I know that tomorrow morning I will be standing over the same drawer looking for socks with orange stitching.