The Cat Puked, and I Was Out of Paper Towels

You see, Metaphor and I have worked out this little routine. 

She pukes, I scoop up the disgusting warm slimy goop with a paper towel, which I drop into a trash bag, then scrub the carpet with a wet sponge. 

(Then I put a little more food into her bowl, since she is now starving to death.)

Occasionally, she'll puke on the linoleum, where it's an easier clean-up job, but mostly, she prefers the carpet.

So, as I said, I was out of paper towels.  Yet not, unfortunately, out of cat puke.  Flummoxed.

Then, eureka!  I saw I still had paper napkins.  And you know what, those worked just fine.

In a pinch, I could have used Kleenex, too.  Or toilet paper.

And pondering this the other night, as I stored the spare roll of paper towels under the kitchen sink, realized I could also have used any number of things.  Plastic grocery bag.  Washcloth.  Perhaps not ideal solutions, but if all paper towels mysteriously vanished from the face of the earth, I could have found an acceptable work-around.

And that is the difference between someone who is OCPD and someone like me, who is not.  For someone who is OCPD, there is Only One Right Way.  And following such a Terrible Emergency, perhaps a whole system would be laboriously devised to prevent Ever Running Out of Paper Towels again.

This is the tragedy of undiagnosed OCPD, in a nutshell.  Not simply being unable to think "outside the box," but to be unable to realize there is a box at all, and that they're trapped inside.

Your thoughts?