December 14, 2020

Why do all the candy wrappers have to be thrown into the waste basket in the basement bathroom?  No other waste basket will do. Not the one in the bathroom upstairs, not the one in the kitchen, not the one in Robert’s bedroom. No matter what sort of candies the wrapper came from, it still has to go to that one and only waste basket. If anyone places a shiny wrapper in any other place, Robert will retrieve it and carry to the bathroom downstairs.

Why does the floss pick have to be disposed of by dropping it into the waste basket in the main bathroom? Not any other container. Not even if that requires patiently waiting outside the bathroom until Robert’s cousin finishes his shower – sometimes more than 30 minutes.

Why do Robert’s lunches always come in the same sequence:  poblano, eggplant, chicken fingers, hamburgers, poblano, eggplant, chicken fingers, hamburgers, take out form Outback or Applebees’ and then again poblano, eggplant…. I am glad that Robert asks for the take-out after running his four dishes twice but I don’t know why he makes this arrangement either. Does he believe that the take-outs are something special and thus are both: the part of the routine and the break in the routine?

Why does Robert get agitated when I enter my daughter’s room or my husband’s office to talk with either of them for a few minutes. From another end of the house, Robert calls, “Out, out, out”.  He wants us to be assigned to our specific places when we are not in the living room, dinning room, or kitchen. At the same time, he allows himself to enter and stay in every room in the house.

Why does Robert eat each of the four stuffed poblano peppers on a different plate? Moreover, there are always the same four plates (with different patterns).  Only when one plate is broken, Robert would choose another specific plate to replace it then and in the future.  This is the custom he created only for the sake of poblano peppers. He can put on the same plate many slices of an eggplant with cheese and tomato sauce. That sometimes makes the plate look very unappealing, but Robert doesn’t care.

A few times on this blog, I wrote about Robert’s vision of the universe which consists of either separate bubbles, or strings with the same sort of knots on them.   Those strings do not cross each other. For those purposefully disjointed worlds Robert establishes rules that he knows well but we desperately want to understand.

In two previously written posts: Fighting Entropy, https://krymarh.wordpress.com/2019/10/25/fighting-entropy/ and Rejecting Entropy https://krymarh.wordpress.com/2017/02/06/rejecting-entropy/ I connected Robert’s behaviors to his resistance against Entropy. I also wrote how often we tried to make Robert more flexible by having him to accept new situations or new solutions to repeated events. We want Robert to create a more general, unified vision of the universe with more chaos but also more freedom.