Little Big Town – "Boondocks" (2005)

You can take it or leave it

This is me

This is who I am!

I have good news and bad news for you today.

2 or 3 lines has always been self-absorbed as all get out.  But last month, I produced a series of posts that represent a personal best when it comes to narcissistic navel-gazing.

But it’s a new month – “Narcissistic November” is over!  Today’s post will bring an end to what probably seemed like an endless series of posts discussing obsessive-compulsive personality disorder . . . and then we’ll be ready to move on.  

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that I’m not going to do another audio advent calendar this year.  I’m sorry to disappoint you, but the decision is final.  (Doing 24 posts in 24 days last December left me plumb tuckered out, and a wise man learns from his mistakes.)

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According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – or “DSM-5” for short – an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder diagnosis requires the presence of four or more of the following behaviors:

1.  Preoccupation with details, rules, schedules, organization, and lists

2.  A striving to do something perfectly that interferes with completion of the task

3.  Excessive devotion to work and productivity (not due to financial necessity), resulting in neglect of leisure activities and friends

4.  Excessive conscientiousness, fastidiousness, and inflexibility regarding ethical and moral issues and values

5.  Unwillingness to throw out worn-out or worthless objects, even those with no sentimental value

6.  Reluctance to delegate or work with other people unless those people agree to do things exactly as you want

7.  A miserly approach to spending for themselves and others because they see money as something to be saved for future disasters

8. Rigidity and stubbornness

I plead guilty as charged to #1, #2, #3, #5, and #6.  And I wouldn’t deny that #4 and #8 probably apply to me as well.

That leaves #7.  I don’t think that I’m miserly, but I am frugal.  (I hate to spend more money on things than I have to – even when the amount in question is insignificant.)

But whether #7 applies or not, there’s little question that I exhibit more than enough of the behaviors listed in the DSM-5 to justify an OCPD diagnosis.

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Just before I started writing this post, I stumbled across a Free Press article titled “Nobody Has a Personality Anymore.”

“Today, every personality trait is seen as a problem to be solved,” according to the author, Freya India.  “Therapy-speak has taken over our language.”

She continues:

[W]e are being taught that our personalities are a disorder. . . . Now you are always late to things, not because you are lovably forgetful, not because you are scattered and interesting, but because of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).  You are shy and stare at your feet when people talk to you, not because you are your mother’s child, not because you are gentle and sweet and blush the same way she does – nope, it’s autism.  

You are the way you are not because you have a soul, but because of your symptoms and diagnoses; you are not an amalgam of your ancestors or a curious constellation of traits but the clinical result of a timeline of childhood events.

Exactly!

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Here’s something else very interesting that I learned from that article.

Survey data on self-reported mental health diagnoses shows that liberals in general, and white liberal women in particular, are more likely than other groups to say that they suffered from a mental health condition (e.g., depression).

However, mental distress is more strongly linked to one’s generation than it is to one’s gender or political orientation.  

Each American generation since the baby boomers is progressively more depressed than the generation that came before.

A 2024 survey of over 3,000 Americans found that 67% of Gen Z men and 72% of Gen Z women believe that  “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.”   But only 27% of baby boomer men and 34% of baby boomer women said that mental health challenges represented an important part of their identity.

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I’m a boomer male, so it should come as no surprise that I have chosen to reject an OCPD self-diagnosis.

I don’t care how many of the DSM-5’s criteria for OCPD apply to me.  

I may be weird as hell.  (That’s part of my charm!). But I don’t have a personality disorder – I just have a personality!

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I’ve featured Little Big Town’s “Boondocks” before, and I’ll probably feature it again.  

I love “Boondocks” despite finding it somewhat lacking in authenticity.  (You might feel the same way about 2 or 3 lines.)

Click here to listen to “Boondocks,” which was a top ten country hit in 2005.

Click here to buy “Boondocks” from Amazon.

Gavin DeGraw – "I Don't Want to Be" (2004)

All I have to do is think of me

And I have peace of mind

(Ur funny!)

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According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – or “DSM-5” – one of the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder is “excessive devotion to work and productivity.”

At first blush, that doesn’t seem to apply to me.  I retired from my job several years ago, and I was far from being a workaholic during my working years.  

But the word “work” doesn’t just refer to a job you’re paid to do.  It can also be used to describe any mental or physical effort that is performed to in order to achieve a goal – whether you’re paid a salary for that effort or not.

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Think about the leisure activities that I’ve talked about in the previous posts – e.g., watching TV and movies, reading, collecting coins and sports cards, and playing bar trivia.  

According to one source, those with OCPD “choose hobbies that are organized and structured, and they approach them as a serious task requiring work to perfect.”  

That description certainly applies to hobbies like coin and sports card collecting, which require considerable organization and sustained effort.  But does it apply to watching TV and movies?

It does when you watch TV the way I do.  Before I watch a new streaming series, I read reviews – and when I’m done, I add the series to my list of watched shows.

I also read reviews before choosing a movie, and keep a list of the movies I watch.  But I often follow up one movie with other films by the same director, or from the same historical era – my movie-watching choices are organized and structured.

For example, earlier this year I watched about a dozen examples of French “poetic realism” films from the 1930s and 1940s – movies like The Rules of the Game, Hôtel du Nord, and Children of Paradise.  And I watched them in chronological order.

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My approach to reading is equally systematic.  

I currently have 34 library books in my apartment.  If you don’t believe me, check out this photo:

(Actually, that number is an understatement.  There’s a library book on my bedroom nightstand and another one on my coffee table that I forgot to include in that photo.  Plus I have half a dozen library books on my Kindle.  So the actual count is more like 42 books.)

Those library books were not chosen willy-nilly.  For example, I’m sitting on several collections of short stories by the late Nobel Prize-winning author, Alice Munro.

    

Earlier this year, I read a long New Yorker article about Munro, who chose to stay with her second husband even after she learned that he had sexually abused one of her daughters from her first marriage.  (The abuse began when the daughter was only nine, and continued for several years.)

That article cited a number of Munro’s short stories that featured women who were desperately in love with emotionally unavailable or abusive men.  Like some of her characters, Munro was apparently in thrall to her second husband – despite the extremely disturbing nature of his behavior, she chose to stay with him. 

I was fascinated by that New Yorker article, and decided that I needed to read not only the dozen or so stories it mentioned, but all 163 of Munro’s short stories.  Once I managed to obtain all 14 of her story collections from my library, I started reading them.

Why did I need to have all 14 of Munro’s books before sitting down to read the first one?  Surely you wouldn’t expect me to start reading her first book until I had all of them in my possession.  

What if I got through her first five books and wasn’t able to find her sixth one?  I needed to read them in chronological order – skipping from the fifth story collection to the seventh without reading the sixth one first was not have an option!

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But when it comes to making the case that I have an “excessive devotion to work and productivity,” the most persuasive piece of evidence that I could offer is this wildly successful little blog itself.

I’ve published almost 2200 posts since I gave birth to 2 or 3 lines in November 2009.  (Maybe I should have named it 2 or 3 posts a week because that’s what I’ve averaged over the past 16 years.)

Those 2200 posts contain over two million words!  That’s the equivalent of 20 to 25 average-length books.

So if I had started writing books in 2009 instead of spending all my time on this stupid blog, I could have cranked out two dozen or so books by now?  

I’m not sure if I have OCPD.  But I’m pretty sure I have depression.

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Gavin DeGraw’s 2004 hit, “I Don’t Want to Be,” was used as the theme song for the WB’s teen drama series, One Tree Hill – a show I’ve never watched.

When I watched the official music video for “I Don’t Want to Be,” I was pretty sure that I recognized the actress who portrayed the angsty teenager.  After a little research, I figured out that actress was Shiri Appleby, who was one of the stars of UnREAL, a brilliant series about a Bachelor-type reality show that I watched on Hulu earlier this year.

Shiri Appleby in UnREAL

Click here to watch that official music video.

Click here to buy “I Don’t Want to Be” from Amazon.

Great White – "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" (1989)

My, my, my

I’m once bitten, twice shy, baby

The current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – “DSM-5” for short – defines obsessive-compulsive personality disorder as “a persistent pattern of preoccupation with order; perfectionism; and control of self, others, and situations.”

One of the specific indications for OCPD that’s listed in the DSM-5 is “reluctance to delegate or work with other people unless those people agree to do things exactly as the patient wants.”

Before retiring a few years ago, I was a partner at a large law firm in Washington, DC.  I was never entirely comfortable delegating tasks to other lawyers at my firm – whenever possible, I preferred to do the job personally.

I remember one particular instance when I assigned one part of a large project to a younger lawyer.  I wasn’t happy about doing that, but I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to get the work done on time if I tried to do everything by myself.

The young associate came to me a few days before the deadline and said that wasn’t going to be able to finish his assignment on a timely basis because of other work commitments.  (Needless to say, I never used that associate again.)

My reluctance to delegate tasks is partly explained by experiences like that one.  When you put someone else in charge of doing something, you take a risk.  If they drop the ball, you can get burned – or bitten (in the words of today’s featured song).

Of course, even if that young lawyer had completed his part of the assignment on time, I probably would have felt the need to rewrite his part of the document we were preparing – not necessarily because what he had written was wrong, but because it wouldn’t have been written in the same way that I would have written it. 

In other words, my reluctance to delegate work to other lawyers resulted not only from my fear of not having control over whether a deadline would be met, but also from my perfectionism – the only person I really trusted to do the job right was me. 

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My need to control “self, others, and situations” wasn’t limited to my work life – it sometimes reared its ugly head during my leisure-time activities . . . like my weekly trivia competitions.

When I started playing trivia, my teammates were the three bartenders at the brewery where the game took place.  Because they were kept pretty busy pouring beer and running credit cards, it made sense for me to write down the answers and take them up to the host.  I always asked for my teammates’ input before deciding how to respond to a question, but it usually fell to me to make the final decision concerning what our answer would be. 

I’ve played on a number of different teams since then.  Most of the time, I’m the guy on the team who writes down the answers and turns them in to the host.  But that doesn’t mean I have control over how we answer – the process of deciding on an answer is a democratic one.  

Not being in control takes a lot of pressure off me.  If an answer turns out to be wrong, it’s not my fault – it’s the team’s mistake.  

And who would want to be on a team with a control freak who insists on making all the decisions?  Even if that person is the smartest player in the room, everyone on the team wants to feel like they are contributing.

The bottom line is that you can’t win at trivia by yourself – you need a diverse group of teammates with complementary expertise.  I have teammates who know a lot more about certain subjects than I do.  If I’m not willing to trust their answers when we have questions concerning those subjects, the team is not going to be successful.

   

One person I used to play with didn’t get that.  He was a very good player, and knew a lot that I didn’t – so we complemented each other well.  But whenever our team members had a difference of opinion concerning what our answer should be, he would get upset if I didn’t turn in the answer he preferred – he took that as a lack of respect for his knowledge.  

I found myself going with his answer more often than not when the team was split on how to respond – not because I necessarily trusted him to know an answer, but because I knew he would get all pissy if we didn’t use his answer and it turned out he was right.  In other words, I was letting my judgment be influenced by the desire to avoid having to deal with his bullsh*t.

He blew up a couple of times when we didn’t go with his answer, and that was that.  I really enjoyed that team, which consisted of an eclectic group of individuals who had come together more or less accidentally.  But he was toxic – he took the fun out of playing.  

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It took a while, but I finally cured myself of the need to be in control at trivia – not only because having one person make all the decisions isn’t the best winning strategy, but also because being part of a successful team is much more enjoyable than being a lone wolf.

But there is one aspect of trivia that I think is best handled by an enlightened despot – at least if that enlightened despot is me.

I’ll explain in the next 2 or 3 lines. 

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Click here to read my 2015 post featuring Great White’s 1989 cover of Ian Hunter’s “Once Bitten, Twice Shy.”  (You’ll give thanks if you do!)

Click here to watch the official music video for “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” – which richly deserves its place on the New York Times “15 Essential Hair Metal Videos” list.

Click here to buy “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” from Amazon.