I like to think of myself as a flexible guy — able to roll with the punches, able to work around problems, able to, y’know, cope. It’s amazing how quickly and how profoundly that self-image can be shaken simply by adding an extra person to the household.

Recently fallen on some sudden, transitory, but inarguably hard times, The Stepson will be staying with us for a while. Whatever other effects this has wrought and will continue to wreak on the delicate ballet of The Missus’s and my everyday life, it has revealed in me — to myself — a deep attachment to Keeping Trivial Things Unchanged.

Case in point: tableware. It really doesn’t matter that The Missus and I (mostly I, probably) have always kept the matched flatware in the drawer in the plastic bin with the variously sized and shaped little niches: one each for big knives, butter knives, dinner forks, teaspoons, tablespoons, and dessert forks. It doesn’t really matter that the various mismatched flatware (teaspoons, mostly) is just sort of tumbled together at the front of the drawer, where it can be easily retrieved without having to root around. It doesn’t really matter that we use the mismatched teaspoons just for dishing out canned pet food.

And, especially, it doesn’t really matter that all these neat little anal-retentive/obsessive-compulsive categories of household objects and their uses are suddenly blurring around the edges.

So if all that doesn’t really matter, whence the pursed-lips exasperation I suddenly find on my face when I go to feed the dog or cat and can’t find any mismatched teaspoons, but plenty of the matched sort? or when I pull open the drawer and find dessert forks and dinner forks shamelessly copulating in each others’ apartments?

What’s wrong with me?

I know: nothing is wrong with me. Everybody has his or her little “things” (or so goes the palliative advice which I can even now hear myself offering someone else in similar straits). Crotchets, right?

And yet, dang, I’m disappointed in myself. None of it is worth making an issue over, all of it could be corrected simply by putting a bug (or series of bugs) in The Stepson’s ear — or The Missus’s, come to that. But nope. Me, I’d apparently prefer to pout.