Floor Tiles

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from: http://www.xkcd.com/c245.html

PERFECT!

Hehe.

Yep!! ! That's me back in the day!! !

One thing that made me think I might be OCD.

But, does anyone else feel hypnotized by tile patterns on floors or walls?

Great

I see patterns in tiles sometimes. Faces and such.

When I was a child, I used to watch my steps while out in the street, and avoid stepping on cracks or on the lines that separated the pavement tiles. Or, conversely, I would try to step only on them. Sometimes I would step on the lines, then over them, them on them again, observing a specific pattern. It seemed to mean something.

It made me wonder about OCD, too. There are other things I do that are a bit OCD-ish. I replay some past situations in my mind, again and again, and agonize over whether I had acted and spoken right (or over whatever I think I had done wrong). I have a special ritual to get rid of this, when it gets too obsessive – I let my mind scan over the situation without dwelling on the details, so that I have this general gist of it, then I squeeze my eyes shut, press them with my fingers, and breathe in, hard, trying to keep my mind blank. After I repeat this a few times, it works. When I was a child, I used to move my fingers in specific patterns, or imagine that I was moving them – for example, I’d trace a rectangle with my finger, first clockwise, then counter-clockwise, many times over. I still do this sometimes when I’m bored, though much more rarely than I used to. There are times when I have an urge to grind my teeth together, or bite the fabric of my sleeve and grind it between my teeth. It makes me shudder and brings shivers down my spine, in spite of myself, but I think this is exactly why I do it - I seem to have a compulsion to experience the nasty sensation many times over. I know, this must sound really weird, and I try to fight it - I forbid myself to think about it whenever I have this impulse - but it's there. Also, songs may get "stuck" in my head and it's difficult to get them out. It drives me to distraction sometimes, when there is nothing in my head but a random piece of music which repeats again and again and I can't stop it.

But in general, these things don’t get either better or worse – they’re just there and have always been, as far as I can remember. They never get too disruptive, and I guess there are too few of them to constitute any significant obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

As for patterns, I often see them in clouds, if I care to look for a longer time. Faces, animals, buildings, landscapes. Sometimes I see patterns such as faces in cracks on walls, or in the oil that floats in puddles on the road. I guess it’s more about having a vivid imagination, and easily making comparisons between two seemingly unconnected things, than about having an eye for patterns as such. I catch myself looking at some simple thing and seeing something else entirely in it - if I stop to look at a crack in an old mossy wall, it becomes a river flowing through a prehistoric forest of tree ferns, or, if it is moss growing on the rough bark of a tree, it may turn into groups of dwarf pines clinging to rocks somewhere high up in the mountains. I wonder sometimes if it could be in any way connected to whatever attention issues I have; by now I’ve met more than one person with AD(H)D who do exactly the same, and they all also have very vivid imaginations and daydream a great deal.

Now go read them all over again, and this time, hover the mouse pointer over the pictures. You missed something.

I used to do that.