Do you do this?

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I have a tendency to put things parallel or in certain patterns to each other. When I was a little child I always had to put my father's shoes perfectly parallel, and I ordered pens by colour. Now I sometimes put the things on my desk in geometrical shapes or, when I'm standing on tiles, my feet have to stand exactly parallel to the lines.

It's not obsessive though. I can stop it if I want to, and nowadays I almost only do it when I'm bored.

Do you do something similar?

I do this too, but it becomes obsessive in me. It makes even walking down a pavement sometimes difficult for me.

I'm curious. In my apartment, my guitars are all neatly aligned in a row against a counter. Is this an aspie/autistic trait? In an NT home, is it expected those guitars would be scattered all over the place?

Yes, I'm like that in certain ways for certain things.

I just do it for fun. I like making patterns with m&m's, and when I was little I used to take the chiclet gum you get out of the machines that are pink, green, yellow, white and burgundy and divide them up and play war with them and the last color I had left after chewing all the rest won.

As a child, I have always arranged objects in patterns or according to size. I also organized my colored pencils and crayons (those Big Box ones with 96 crayons) according to the way they were originally ordered. I knew instantly when someone tampered with them because the tips would not be uniformly sharpened and the crayons were out of order. I also have a tendency to arrange items in a symmetrical manner (or as close as possible). If I have 2 tables of similar design and size, there will be one on each side of the room. I have worked on trying not to be too obsessed about such things, though it is hard to ignore.

I'm the same way about tiles. Something just feels innately "wrong" when my foot transgresses the clearly-marked border of the squares.

I do it as well though it usually depends on the environment. When I was a kid, my Dad had a recording studio setup with a huge mixing board covered by dozens and dozens of knobs and I'd have to set them all to 12 o'clock which definitely irked him. The most obsessive its been was when I worked in a huge car parts warehouse with very little social interaction...the longer I spent by myself, the more ritualistic I became in moving every single box until they were at right angles with each other and the shelf. It got so bad that I basically didn't stock anything new...just ran around moving everything like a nut.

Even as a kid, I've always really enjoyed sorting, ordering, and putting things into categories. Even to this day, I find it really relaxing. I've always liked lists of names in alphabetical order and the variations that names can have.

Yeah, I do stuff similar to this too.

I live in nearly perpetual chaos but some things are ordered. For example, my collection of vintage civil defence geiger counters and survey meters are neatly aligned in a row on the shelf. Likewise, my canned foods (I do a little prepping, so there's a lot of them) are all organized neatly according to what they are and when they came into the pantry. That way, I can use a FIFO system to make certain that I use them in order so that they do not spoil. I have also gone out and bought all new utensils at IKEA so that I could finally have them all match and be in good condition. I used to have my parent's hand me downs and while functional, they didn't match and were in poor condition. Likewise, IKEA supplied me with a lot of new kitchen stuff like glasses and other stuff. I actually went IKEA crazy for a while and started buying everything I could from there, but that's another story of another obsession...