I totally do this! It’s one of my favorite things to do on long car trips 
Also, and this is slightly odd, I sometimes will hold onto the little side handle that you use to open/close the door and pretend it’s a joystick and i’m actually driving the car with it. Forward to go back to stop etc. Is that strange or what!?
okay, one other thing i do that I think is strangely obsessive. Whenever i eat cereal that has similar sized chunks… say corn pops, I have eat them symetrically. If i chew two of them on one side of my mouth then the next bite has to be two on the other side. If i end up with one left and i’m… all symetical already, then i chop it in half and chew each half on a different side. Strange eh?
Sometimes I pretend that there are farmers making cheese in my pants. They’re little guys, like the Rice Crispy or Keebler Elves. This mostly happens on the subway when it’s dark and I smell like cheese.
-CoffeeGuy
Whenever I go somewhere new, I imagine what might have happened there in the past. I am certain that giant sloth once crawled toward their caves along the cat food isle of PetSmart. A young girl actually died of the plague on the very spot where I sat in my friend’s garden petting the cat. etc. etc. In a building with a known history, I go crazy with details. On castle tours and what have you, I always speculate about the life of the servants, how someone might have robbed the place, and wonder about people who may have used the place as a squat before it was opened for tourists. In abandoned buildings, instead of imagining, I try to figure out what went on.
If I’m somewhere, I’m probably constructing stories about what happened on the spot 100 years ago, 500 years ago, or 3 million years ago.
However, I do not do this on the second or higher floor of buildings built in my lifetime. Even though, I know, passenger pigeons might have nested in the trees in the very space that is now occupied by the second floor fax machine, it seems unfair and wrong to consider the spot anything but “up in the air.”
car runner is, and always has been, a horse. Changes color. Unless their is a crop beside the road… that’s a long-legged guy.
OH MY GOD… I almost do the same, I’ve never heard anyone verbalise it before. I do the same thing but the person jumps the shadows on the side of the car, street whatever. I do when I’m driving too!!!
BIZZARE!!!:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
YES that’s it… ‘shadow jumping’ lets call it!
Now it has a name.
I too am a fellow shadow jumper!
This thread is freaking me out, I love that my weirdness is not alone!!
Okay, this is some weird shit.
Anyway, I also do this:
ALL the effing time.
I also talk to myself. Out loud. Constantly. And not just little murmuring, I mean full conversations. If I’m thinking of someone, I’ll talk to 'em. Say, I thought “Oh, I have to remember to tell Lynn about that”…I’ll do it. I’ll just talk into the air and hold a full conversation.
I am rather disturbed by this now that I mention it.
I have a thing about candy of different colors. If I eat Starbursts or M&Ms or Skittles, I have to have one of each color in my hand before I can eat any.
I used to have the little person who skipped next to the car, too. Maybe I haven’t noticed it lately, but I think it’s gone.
This one is pretty funny, I’d imagine–I sometimes break out into a spontaneous run. Doesn’t matter what I’m doing, if I’m going to get some juice from the fridge, sometimes I’ll just break out into a run instead of walking there. I also do impromptu little dances. For no reason. With no music playing.
I’m going to stop, because the more I talk, the more insane I sound.
Not sure if anyone has mentioned this but… When I’m reading a webpage, or doing anything on the computer other than a game, I left click on the page and highlight it. Very quickly - the whole highlighting thing lasts maybe half a second, and then I keep repeating the highlighting and unhighlighting action. Don’t know if that makes any sense or not, but I’ve never seen anyone do it before.
Hah! There it is… The exact same thing I do. Wow… Strange.
I think I win the award for most insane:
Lets see:
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I have a car runner, except its not an actual vehicle. Its sort of a single point that zooms along with me. I also move my finger along with this point, making it “jump” over stuff. Sometimes with powerliners I imagine it running along the lines and when it gets to a pole, its like a relay race and it triggers the next guy off, down the next line.
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We have these “V” shaped markers called chevrons on our highways. As the car approaches one, it looks like its closing like a mouth. I pretend they’re alligators attempting to eat our car.
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I have “Inverse Body Symmetry”. I tried to AVOID touching anything. If I’m walking through a busy hall or something, I twist and turn in weird ways to avoid touching anything/anyone. I CANNOT open doors any more than they already are - I have to find some way to slink through the doorway without touching it (I often enter doors sideways, rather than forwards).
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I also do the random highliting of paragrahs when reading.
Well, I seem pretty unique. I haven’t seen any of these yet:
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When eating Mini Wheats cereal, I HAVE to turn them all over so the icing is facing up. When adding the milk, I HAVE to pour milk over each chunk.
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I do lots of weird things with my eyes. If I see a light flashing on and off, I have to syncronize blinking my eyes with the light so it looks like its always off or always on. People catch me doing this all the time. I also have an obsession with “aligning” random objects. I’ll close one eye and squint with the other as I attempt to align random points in a room. I do a similar thing with gaps in objects…I treat them like an eyesight on a gun and see what “targets” I can align it with. I also do the “cursive eye-writing” with things like candles.
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Whenever it rains I like watching the drop formations on windows. I imagine its some sort of vast society, and make up some crazy history about it. When one drop starts rolling down the window, I imagine it’s a monster eating everybody in its path; growing and becoming more powerfull. When it gets to the edge of the window, it falls to its doom!
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Sometimes I get this idea in my head that a given person simply cannot pronounce a certain word. This is deffinitely bizzare. For the longest time I thought my friend couldn’t say the word “cognitive”. I had to trick him into saying it so I could get a deffinitive answer. I DO THIS ALL THE TIME. I think this wins for weirdest habit
I do the same thing, but with toe-tapping. Sometimes I use uprights (telephone poles and whatnot) and sometimes I use driveways and intersecting streets.
Oh, thank Og. I thought it was only me.
Err…umm…me too. It used to be really bad: I couldn’t stop reading a book if the page number wasn’t divisible by 3, I couldn’t leave the house if the the last digital clock I saw was not divisible by 3. Same thing with leaving the car, and so on. Oh, and if I saw the digital clock actually ‘tick’ to the divisble-by-3 time, the number was spoiled and I had to wait another 3 minutes.
I’m much better now, but I still do the math. If I’ve got a big stressful event, I can fall into it again. Meanwhile, I’ve taped over my car clock – there’s nothing wrong with avoidance, right?
My computer clock says 5:49, so I guess I can post this… 
Whenever I’m in a car in the passenger seat (not while driving), I find a point on the windshield that has some imperfection (a spot, a speck, a chip, whatever) and unfocus my eyes so that there are two of it, then play a little game with myself seeing how many things along the side of the road I can get to go inbetween the two points I’ve made. If it’s a sequence of things, like the reflective posts along the side of the road, I have to hit each one. I also do that “Elaborate scenario” when I’m walking somewhere and trying to keep my mind occupied.
Ok, I’ve done most everything listed here at one point or another… Here are a couple more…
I rock my body when I lie in bed. This is accomplished by laying on my side with one hand under my pillow and one on top of the pillow under my head with knees slightly crooked. If I’m lying on my right side, I go from having my left shoulderblade touching the bed with my head facing the cieiling to facing sideways so my ear is flat against the pillow and my left shoulderblade is about three inches off of the bed on the other side.
When I was really young I used to lie on my stomach with ass up in the air and ram my head against the head of my crib and then recoil and repeat. My parent’s say I would move the crib completely across the room by the end of the night.
I’ve done most everything anyone has described here, exceptthe book-eating thing. That guy is a freak! I’m more of a toe-lifter or laser cutter guy than a car runner. If I see a sequence of numbers I try to space the digits in a symmetrical pattern in my head. I pun and rhyme to myself constantly. I’ve only read four sentences in Finnegan’s Wake and decided I probably should read the book, because I spent about five miniutes riffing on all the various words and made up words in my head.
I have a habit of making odd noises. Random ejaculations of mock-terror, dumbfoundedness, or just sheer gibberish.
I constantly have conversations with people in my head. This is especially a problem if I’m angry with someone, because then i tend to argue with them constantly. At times I verbalize these.
If I see a shelf of books I tand to try to reorgarnize tham in my head in an aesthetically pleasing manner. I used to work as a mover for an auction company and would find myself sitting in the doctor’s office trying to figure out how to get all of the furniture out… I color in random floor tiles in my head and try to make patterns.
And I run through hundreds of scenarios in my head, though most of them tend to be in biopic form or movie form more than anything else. I often, to my embarressment, find myself acting on these impulses. An ex-girlfriend once caught me fantasizing about kissing her by rubbing my lips over my own arm. That was a kind of odd one to explain. And I constantly have music going on. In my head or in real life. I’ve been known to play the same song for two to three hours straight. (I can’t tell you how happy I was when I got my first cd player and didn’t have to rewind tapes and guess where the song ended and began.)…
That’s all I can think of for now.
When I’m doing something where I don’t have to think… like washing the dishes, walking somewhere, taking a shower, etc., I day dream. Not your average “it would be nice to be a millionaire” type thing. No. Today on my walk home I imagined what it would be like to have claws like Wolverine from XMen Does. I imagined myself getting jumed by a gang in an alley and defeating all of them. The bad thing is, I have no control over my thoughts… Once started it never ends…
sigh the mind is a dangerous thing.
I have a pattern that I drum my fingernails/fingertips with.
First I go all 5 fingers. Then just the thumb, middle, and pinky. Then the index and ring finger. Then all 5 again.
Been doing it for years, no idea why.
I have games that I play with words, which usually come in handy on a long trip. I do the first-letter-swap thing too, like instead of Muther Fucker, it’s Futher Mucker. My favorite is reading things backwards to see what I come up with. Starbucks becomes Skcubrats (SKUB rats), Uptons becomes Snotpu (SNOT poo). I find it’s the most entertaining and often gives me a good laugh. Also, I have a habit of rhyming phrases. For instance, if someone says “Slap happy”, I can’t help but think “Crap happy” and burst out laughing. One more - I’m not sure what you would call this, but I find myself making random words possessive, although they’re not intended to be. Popeyes is “Eyes of Pop”, sunglasses are “Glasses of Sun”… pretty funny when randomly thrown into everyday conversations. Oh, there’s so much more, but you guys give these games a shot first - I know you can’t wait! 
Whenever I’m in the car and the turn signal gets turned on creating songs to the beat and usual after i’m out of the car I start humming them to myself. Why???
Why???
I’ve done most of these things, too.
I do this, too, which ties in nicely to the “explaining things mentally to others”/“my life as movie” bit. Much like the beginning of Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, but I’ve been doing it since I was about 5.
When I was younger and bored, I’d also explain observations in a weird circular fashion. Not out loud, of course. I.e.,
“That window is open.”
“Why is it open?”
“Because we wanted to let in some fresh air.”
“Why would we want to do that?”
“Because…”
I’d try to see how long I could do that before getting frustrated with my own inanity.
My car-runner was me–I just imagined myself out the window, and I’d tense up my legs and rear for the “jumps”. Shadows, cracks on the road, curbs…I really had no idea others did similar things.
Also, I begin and end each staircase on my right foot. If it’s an odd number of stairs, and I don’t know it because it’s unfamiliar, then I do a little step-hop as soon as I can tell, so I’ll end on the right foot. I also chew things the same number of times on both sides of my mouth. These things I don’t do as much as I used to, but it was all the time as a kid.
Air piano, having a few of my own mental adjectives for things, symmetry of body (rubbing both elbows), watching my eyelids, Tetris in my head, yep.
Numbers (mostly digits) have very distinct personalities. (I hate 8, by the way. Nasty fellow.) It helps me remember passwords and codes. Also, sometimes if I’m adding a long string of values in my head, I mentally tick off parts of the number symbol to help keep count. Even though I know very well that 6 + 3 = 9, I’ll count the points of the 3.
About the songs in my head…I can sort of twitch a weird muscle in my head to make a quiet, windy, rustling noise in my right ear only. I do this with the beat sometimes.
When I see a person on TV who is unfamiliar, I mentally and with my fingers, pretend to sculpt their heads out of clay. Sometimes I do this while observing strangers at the library or at a restaurant.