Order Over Chaos

November 27, 2010 at 6:52 pm (Essay) (Movies, Music, Video Games)

I’m a little neurotic. A bit of a neat-freak. And probably borderline OCD at times. I like the comfort of having routines. Routines feel safe. They give order. Which, ultimately, allows you to make it through portions of your day on cruise control. Y’know, basically the same governing principles of the zombie genus.

For this reason, I’ve been known to alphabetize my movie, music, and video game racks over the years. Order over chaos. Even as a kid, I preferred this sort of system. It allows me to scan the rack and immediately find whichever title I’m seeking out, rather than having to focus on each title to see if it’s the one I’m looking for. All that happens in that scenario, is you get distracted by another one along the way and veer off in another direction.

But they’d throw you a curveball, sometimes. Because you have to make a decision very early on – do you file them by the title/name that appears on the spine of the case or by what you know it as?

This. Is. Huge.

Take the Nightmare on Elm Street series, for example. I prided myself on owning the entire collection. The problem is, the sixth film in the series is actually titled Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. And the next one – which is already humorous, considering I was just talking about the “final” nightmare supposedly – was called Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Decision time. Do you break the rules and place them all together still, despite the spines breaking alphabetical order when scanning, because they’re part of the same series? Or do you place Freddy’s Dead with the other “F” titles, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare with the “W” titles, and thus splitting the series apart from one another? It was, well, enough to cause nightmares.

When I owned a Sega Genesis as a kid, the football series started as John Madden Football and eventually just dropped the “John” to become Madden plus its year. File them all under “M” for Madden, or split them up? I need to call a timeout and think about this.

Tupac under “T” or 2Pac under the numerical artists?

You get the point. Something that is meant to simplify and eliminate potential stress of not finding, becomes a dog chasing its own tail of insanity. Speaking of, don’t even get me started on Snoop Dogg versus Snoop Doggy Dogg and how I choose to organize that in my iTunes library.