I have a theory I call UCF – the Universal Conservation of Fat. The theory goes something like this: there is only so much fat in the world to go around, so if one person loses a lot of weight, somebody else somewhere has to gain it. It might be spread out among several other people, but at the same time, several people might lose weight and it could be picked up by one, unamused person in sweatpants.
I’m sure that you’ve observed this phenomenon in your own life. At some point, you’ve probably gone on a diet or started jogging or picked up a tapeworm or something and lost a lot of weight. I’m sure that you noticed a lot of hostile looks from friends and acquaintances who wanted to be happy for you but couldn’t quite manage because they had been putting on a bit of weight themselves lately.
I understand that UCF flies in the face of empirical evidence; as a nation, we are getting more and more obese every year. There certainly doesn’t seem to be any shortage of fat in this country. Maybe it’s one of those quantum phenomena, like light being both a particle and a wave. At any rate, given how heavy I’ve gotten over the past couple of years, somebody has certainly gotten their life together somewhere.
The reason I mention UCF is because it has led me to formulate a second, even more startling theory: UCAN – or the Universal Conservation of Annoying Neuroses.
Here’s the way I figure it:
For most of my life, I’ve been fairly neurotic – not excessively, not trainspottingly or Civil-War-reenactingly disturbed or anything, but fairly neurotic nevertheless. Aside from a normal array of social insecurities, my own particular tic has always been to latch onto a particular song or piece of music, then play it over and over again, until I have squeezed every possible drop of enjoyment from it. A series of bitter former roommates with haunted, hollow eyes can attest to this.
The thing is, over the past couple of years, I’ve gotten a lot less neurotic. Maybe it’s getting married that has calmed me down. Maybe it’s been holding down a steady job. Maybe it’s just that I’m getting more mature (though I’m not banking on that). At any rate, I don’t put a lot of psychic energy out into the universe, wondering if a roomful of strangers like me or not - that sort of thing.
Unfortunately, UCAN says that that manic, annoying energy has to go somewhere. It has started to infect the inanimate objects in my life.
It started with our toilets. We have two in the house. Lately, the downstairs one can't complete a full flush; my wife or I need to stand there and make sure that the handle is depressed for the entire length of the flush, or it loses confidence and stops before it has completed its job (and really, isn't that a job that we can all agree we want completed?) Our second toilet has a classic toilet neurosis; it needs the handle jiggled immediately after it has flushed, so while it can do the job on its own, it suffers from performance anxiety and needs to be reassured with a little tap, which ensures one of us have to stand by just as long with either toilet to effectively hold its hand.
Then, about a month ago, my laptop computer started displaying some obsessive/compulsive mannerisms. For one reason or another, I haven’t been online with my laptop or connected to the internet for a while. After a week or so of this, my computer started sending me nervous little notes pointing out that I hadn’t updated my anti-virus software lately and did I happen to want to check on that right now!!!!? Because I hadn’t been connected to another computer during that time, there was no reason to check for an update, but I told my computer I would be happy to do so as soon as it was convenient. Apparently, that didn’t mollify my laptop (or HAL as I started to call it), because I started receiving a series of ever more frequent and shrill notes that made me wonder if the time had come for my laptop and I to just be friends.
Most recently, I purchased a small, handheld digital device to play audiobooks. It came with the reassuring name of Otis. You can’t ask for a more competent, unflappable-sounding name than Otis. Otis is the name your barber might have, or that of a particularly good taxi driver. Unfortunately, my particular device is more like a Miron or a Mortimer than an Otis. Recently, I was listening to it in the car, when I got distracted and needed to rewind a little, to catch what I’d missed. I discovered that Otis only rewinds to preset one-hour intervals, so I had to listen to 40 minutes of prose that I had just listened to in order to catch up. I imagine a fussy little man in a cardigan inside the device getting all anal-retentive and insisting on rerunning the entire chapter, just so everything is played in neat, hourly increments.
Naturally, I’ve gotten a bit neurotic and paranoid about all this, so most of my inanimate objects have started working again, which really just proves my point, doesn’t it?
