Numbering and lettering your socks is NOT O.C.D.

A friend of mine noticed recently that my socks had little numbers and letters on them (under the toes). He asked me what it was, and I told him, quite simply, that I number AND letter my socks. He looked at me with a certain amount of amusement and/or disgust and/or pity and told me that it was OCD.

Now I know what Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is - its when you can't stop washing your hands, or you keep fretting about whether you turned the oven off before you left home, or looking at all your baseball cards before you go to bed every night. Let me tell you why numbering and lettering my socks is not OCD, aided as always with a little schematic. The numbers enumerate the socks obviously, and the lettering is L (left) or R (right).

Case 1 (top) is optimal: I am wearing the "L" of the "nth" sock on my left foot, and the "R" of the "nth" sock on my right foot. All is good, and the flowers smell great.

Case 2 is a common mistake made by slobs who don't care about how each sock looks. No, I am not just talking about pairing a brown sock with a black sock (in which case you are probably single, live in your mother's basement and masturbate excessively. Or you have an IQ of 150 and are working on quantum physics. Either way, no excuse. You are beyond saving, and I am not wasting breath on you). I am talking about multiple pairs of socks that, when brand new, looked identical. Here is a pairing of an "nth" L sock with an "mth" R. There is no cause for physical discomfort, except that you may have worn the "nth" pair with your new brown shoes on a sweaty day, causing a mild brown coloration on this pair, while the "mth" pair may have no such discoloration. This causes pseudo-asymmetry, which is a no-no; further, if the socks have gone through variable wash cycles, you will now be wearing socks that are variably stretched and/or worn out, and if you can't feel variably stretched and/or worn out socks on your feet, you have the hide of an elephant.

Note: I do not have baby pink socks. For that matter I don't have powder blue socks. These are for the purpose of illustration only.

Case 3: By far the most important reason I do this. Note that I have switched the letters, so now I am wearing an "R" sock on my left foot and vice versa. Obviously this does not matter the very first time you buy the socks because they are symmetrical. But with time, what happens is that your big toe stretches out the sock on side only - the right side of the left sock, and vice versa, as you look down at your feet. And so out of the blue, if you wear your "R" sock on your left foot (as illustrated here), what happens is that: a. Your big toe is now constricted in the little bit of fabric that was originally meant to hold the little toe, and b. Your little toe now has a ginormous cavity it has no hope of filling (yeah, I know there's an R rated joke here), and so what
happens is that the extra fabric folds over, jams in between toes, or tries to hide in the crease under your little toe (bleaurgh. It hurts to even write this). Again, if you have a buffalo's sensitivity in the foot region, good for you. I however have sensitive feet, and this extra floppy fabric is extraordinarily vomitous. It makes me go limp waist down and makes me want to feed my feet to a mad hungry pitbull. It has all the pleasantness of a long sloppy wet foot sex session for someone who doesn't have a foot fetish.

Incidentally, the same goes for socks that have been interchangeably worn so that they are now symmetrical (having been assaulted by both feet) because now they are symmetrically loose, with symmetrically floppy fabric that wants to hide in the creases under your toes. The very thought makes my toes curl, although to be fair, I only have vague memories of this feeling of discomfort, sometime before puberty. I think I had a tough time getting my mum to agree that a little marker ink that had bled from my socks to the other clothes in the load was only a minor inconvenience...

Anyway, so that's the reason I do this. As you can see, perfectly reasonable. You should try it too, if you don't do it already (in which case we should have a beer and yell at all the cubes around us).