It’s 3 am.
You’ve been asleep for hours.
Your perpetual somber is slated to end in 3, 2, 1…..
Boom.
Your bladder has woken you up with a specific demand.
There’s no need to tell you what that demand is. Never the less, you have to drag your middle aged ass out of bed and do your thing.
As you make your way into the bathroom, you pass the cotton swabs on the counter. Dagnabbit, those are great.
Certainly, the warning on the package and general common sense admonishes us not to stick those things in our ears. Even still, they’re the perfect size to be placed aurally in the canal where only noise dares to enter.
For those of us who thrive on our obsessive compulsive disorders, passing up a Q-Tip without jamming one in each of our ears so as to generate an eye-twitching eargasm is a harbinger of disastrous things to come.
That being said my dear reader, I offer the following test to reveal to you whether you possess your own obsessive compulsive disorder.
Once again, it’s 3am and you must be lonely.
You have to pee.
When you go to the bathroom, you’re presented with the option to run a Q-Tip through your ear before you commit mellow yellow to the porcelain punch bowl.
What do you do?
If you bypass the goodness of the cotton swab so as to go heed the demands of the your middle aged bladder, too bad for you. Your life is not riddled with those nagging voices which demand that you check your alarm clock at least 4 times prior to going to sleep. You don’t have a constant urge to double and triple check your locked doors, your fantasy football lineup, or your clothing selection for tomorrow.
If you stop for the Q-Tip, confident in the knowledge that your impatient bladder will wait a few while you instigate a little aural on your ears, you’ve displayed symptoms of such a disorder. At the same time, the disorder cannot be dignified on this one event alone.
If, however, you’ve bypassed the Q-Tip and went straight to the can only because you grabbed the bobby pin from your bedside table and cleaned your ears out before even leaving the comfort of your pillow top, then you probably have an issue or two.
Congratulations.
