By Rohiman Haroon

Eccentricity is really a bane. An eccentric person is with a strange behaviour, a non-conformist to the general societal beliefs and norms.

Eccentric people are noncompetitive, not in need of reassurance or reinforcement from society. They are not particularly interested in the opinions or company of other people. They are even unusual in their eating habits and living arrangements.

Someone tells me that I am eccentric. I don’t know about that. What I do know is people with this condition hardly have friends. Even if they do have friends, eccentrics make the living hell for their friends. They repel friends.

I don’t. I have friends but not too many, I guess. May be I am something else. An OCD caught in a deep labyrinth of depression that I repeatedly overthink, making sure that everything in order and harbour dissatisfying feeling if I see it is not the way I want it to be.

I get easily irritated when books arranged on the shelf are not of the same height. When a guest to my home takes out a book from the shelf, I get worried if he doesn’t know where and how to put the book back at the place it should be.

That is also why I don’t have paintings and arty prints on the house wall. I used to have quite a lot of them but they are now in my son’s room, collecting dust. I get irritated when the frames tilt to one side after trying hard to put them in equilibrium and centred.

Just this morning, sweeping and cleaning the front lawn of dry leaves became a challenge. When the wind blew back the dry leaves, and pushed them under the shoe cabinet, I get extremely agitated.

Sweeping from under the heavy cabinet, laden with family shoes of yesteryear, I found an old shoe, a dead house lizard, a hollow shell of a garden snail, a chicken bone and a probable 50-year-old soiled sock, besides the three pieces of dry leaves. Yes, just three fricking leaves… and I broke my back for that!

With the excruciating pain inflicted by the 40-year-old spondylitis on my degenerative L1 to L5, I bent down again to see what else stuck under the cabinet. To my surprise, I found a pair of gold earring (not truly gold, as in the enclosed photo).

It got me thinking. Heck, who’s earring are these? My wife and two daughters do not have an earring hole poked in their ear lobes and definitely, not theirs. A strange find to grasp the dynamic of things and hard for me to understand how those things landed under the shoe cabinet.

My mind somehow twirled and became twisted to comprehend the dynamics between a cabinet and politics. No wonder there’s a lot of weird stuff happening in a political-based Ministerial Cabinet. I snort-laughed for a moment of the prospect.What I found under my shoe cabinet probably reflects the filthy stuff politicians do in the Cabinet. Woo hoo, I am inspired to use this pun intended joke about Cabinet. But, boo hoo…I am overthinking, for a far-fetched, unrelated, illogical reason. An eccentric OCD, may be I am after all.C’est la vie.