One of the things that I have learned about myself is that I am picky about outcomes. It's not that I'm picky about brands, it's about how they're going to act or what kind of effect they're going to have on me and my family.
When I was a kid, my mother told me that Skippy peanut butter was the best peanut butter, that the others just weren't the same, and Skippy was the best. I carried that into my adult life until late in my 50s.
If we didn't have Skippy peanut butter, I didn't eat peanut butter sandwiches or peanut butter and crackers. My wife tried over and over, she would buy the cheap stuff, the store brand stuff. I would taste it and think it tasted bad, and I would go and buy my own peanut butter.
Same thing with canned vegetables. My mother taught me that canned vegetables by Del Monte or one of the other brands were the best. The no-name store brand generic canned vegetables usually had bad stuff in them, or they weren't the same thing, they were lower quality.
I got over that one pretty quick. Green beans are green beans.
When my wife and I would travel and we had all four kids, or just three, or just two, we would always pack a cooler with ice and drinks and cups and snacks in the vehicle. Because when you stop at a convenience store to fill up with gas and four kids and your wife go into the store, you end up spending 50 bucks in the store on top of the gas that you bought. Money was tight at times because kids are expensive and the cooler worked out great in the car.
Now that my children are adults and they don't travel with us, I really prefer not to do the ice in the cooler deal and prefer to just stop and grab a bag of peanuts and keep rolling.
I like my green tea and because it's green tea, I can drink it either at room temperature or in the car temperature or cold or even hot.
When I go somewhere and the forecast calls for rain, I tend to take my umbrella. It's not because I'm scared of getting wet, it's because typically when we go out to do things a one-hour jaunt turns into a five or six hour ordeal that just goes on and on. And if I get wet I'm going to be unhappy! My hair will be damp my clothes will stay damp. I will be grumpy and irritable more than I usually am.
And so I carry an umbrella just in case it rains I Prefer the outcome of being dry over taking the chance and being wet.
Because I retired from a job where I was a highly trained pattern matcher I can sometimes predict what's going to happen. Sometimes way further in advance than my wife or others around me. I Just pick up on things. I've been around a while And I like the outcomes that I like.
I'm picky about the outcomes of my endeavors. I don't like to fail. I fail a lot and I really don't like it.
I don't like to look foolish even though I'd look foolish often So I do things to influence the outcomes so that none of those things happen to me. Or I minimize the possibilities of it happening to me. I'm not picky about brands I'm picky about outcomes.
Shirts have been a fascinating thing. For so long cotton shirts were the way to go and I would sweat in them and the sweat would stay and I would look foolish. So I wouldn't go anywhere or I would have to change shirts.
I discovered that quick dry Under Armor shirts don't show the sweat that I have pouring out of my body. At least not as much as cotton shirts do. And they are lighter and feel better on my skin. So I like to wear Under Armor shirts.
I prefer shirts with a button-down collar if I'm wearing a dress shirt. When I wear a shirt with an open collar it just feels like I'm in the 70s in a disco outfit and look like one of those advertising executives out on a Friday lunch. I don't like looking like that so I'm picky about the outcome when I wear clothes. I even found shirts that I really liked but a lot of them were sold as open collar shirts. So I bought a quick button attacher and I turned them into button-down collar shirts myself. It worked out great!
I don't see anything wrong with being picky about outcomes. If other people see it as a mental illness or as something that you're just hard to get along with that's their issue not yours.
I'm just trying to protect myself from what might happen if the outcome is bad.
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