Seven Deadly Idiosyncrasies

Still no deposit check back from David. You're shocked, I can tell. (Pssst...I am not.) How sorry he should be that he promised to get me the deposit money he owes us by today. Unfortunately for him, my next angry phone call comes tomorrow evening. I think it's time to remind him that I dislike liars, so he should really make sure he gets his suit dry cleaned to meet my smiling face in court....for the full amount of the deposit and then some. Awww shucks.

Anyway, on to my main reason for today's entry...

A while back, an acquaintance challenged me to go public with no less than seven personal quirks. At the time I thought, "Ha! Amateur! I could tell seven quirks about food preparation alone." But then I decided to think about it and really inspect myself for noteworthy ones. What follows is what I felt like writing down. So without further ado, I present you with my seven quirks that made the cut.

1. I love (LOVE) lists. Making them. Reading other people's lists. Assigning categories to things. There is an order and structure to them that delights me to the core. As you might imagine, this very list is satisfying a deep desire inside myself to line everything in my house up at right angles. All the reward with only a fraction of the work!

2. I am very particular about my socks. If they don't fit perfectly, if they're slightly askew, if they have a tiny little stray thread swimming around in them, I feel it and it makes me insane. I can't just let it go or adjust to it. It will torment me until I have to take off my shoe and readjust everything.

3. I like to eat some foods in exact proportion. Specifically, M&Ms. Say, for example, I purchase one of those little bags of M&Ms during a weak moment in the checkout lane at the grocery store. Let's say I open the bag and there are 5 browns, 6 reds, 3 greens, 4 yellows, and 3 blues. After I curse the company for screwing me with an underfilled bag, I arrange all of the candies by color, then begin eating them down so the overall proportion never gets out of whack. So first I eat a red by itself, then a red and brown together, etc. until I have the same amount of each color all the way to the end. This is a relatively new phenomenon for me, but I see now how mentally ill it looks, so perhaps I should work on that.

4. I have deep and unjustified loathing for commercials that employ computer-animated/cartoon animals to really sell it to us. Case in point- the Airwick commercials with the elephant mom speaking in a tidy English accent about how her Airwick eliminates the odor of her disgusting family. Another case in point- the Nasonex bee. God. Get a life, losers. It makes no sense, and I don't think I can roll my eyes far enough into my head to express my disdain for these advertisements. Additionally, I hate commercials that employ computer-animated people. Suck it up! Get real people! Shell out the fifty bucks and go for it. Hell, call me! I'll do it for twenty. Beggars can't be choosers.

5. Sometimes I fixate on things that shouldn't even concern me a little bit. For example, there has been a Cadbury egg in the parking lot of my work since Easter. I know this because the Monday after Easter I parked my car and saw the Cadbury egg and thought to myself, "Those were gold when I was a kid. I should take it. Noooo, that is disgusting. But it IS all wrapped up still. But I don't even like them. But maybe I could give it to someone else, since it's obviously still good and all. But then, in good conscience I would probably have to tell them I found it in the parking lot....etc." You get the idea. So since then I've made it a point to specifically look for the Cadbury egg and see if it's still there. Nearly a month later, it doesn't let me down! Part of me thinks I may be a little sad when it finally disappears. And even then there will be lingering questions. Did someone else take it? If so, did they know it had been sitting there for a month? Or did it blow away? And if so, where to? Will an animal choke to death on its shiny foil wrapper? *sigh*

6. I appreciate few things more than a perfectly worded sentence. There are times (like now) when I spend over an hour working on this steaming turd of a blog to retool sentences and paragraphs until they click in my head juuuuust right. It's a sickness. It's also the reason why I don't update as often as I probably should. Often, even if I feel like I have a story to tell you, I just don't want to deal with my own neurotic editing process.

7. (FINALLY!) Sometimes I think I must be a little bit autistic. I do weird things like count the number of times a person says "ha" when they laugh. Or the number of times a particular person in a crowd claps. And when people speak, I sometimes imagine a scrolling marquee above their head with the text of what they're saying to me passing by. It's like I'm my own closed captioning! So if someone says something mundane to me like, "I went to the store," I will envision it in my head as if I'm typing it and spelling out each word. "I space w-e-n-t space t-o space t-h-e space s-t-o-r-e period." I remember first doing this in high school to alleviate boredom, but now it's part of me.

So there ya go, kids. Seven more pieces of evidence that remind you you should probably have nothing to do with me. Care to accept the challenge and reveal your own?