Do you have any habits so ingrained you've never talked about them with anyone?

In My Humble Opinion
121

Ok, I signed up for these boards just because of this thread… I’m the runner. Yup. At least for me I am. On long car rides (as a passenger) I would always picture MYSELF leaping and bounding along at pace with the car.

If I wasn’t doing that, I was picturing the car itself jumping over shadows on the road.

Now that I’m generally the driver, I find myself continually calculating how long it will take me to get to my destination at my current speed, whenever I’m on a highway with regular milemarkers.

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Okay, I’ve just got to post, because this thread is really quite fascinating. First off, I don’t have a car runner, but I bet I will soon. Sometimes, when I’m a passenger and I haven’t brought anything to read, I count things. I counted 781 green things on the way to school once.

I chew my lips and jiggle my feet. I scratch my teeth, and click them together. I run my fingers through my hair constantly (I am a Valley Girl, bred from the age of two in the San Fernando Valley, and this scarily typical habit grieves me deeply). I find the prime factorizations of times on clocks and numbers on license plates.

My father “reads” the three-letter combinations of license plates to find words in them. He points them out to me, which is quite annoying.

I have an active fantasy life.

I put my body to sleep when I’m bored, leaving my brain and eyes awake as the rest of my body goes rigid and numb (it feels like a mild dose of novocain). It takes some effort to get it to wake up again, especially my hands.

When I see a word I don’t recognise, I reverse it first, and then look for anagrams. I can write in handwriting both upside down and backwards (mirror-writing a la Leonardo da Vinci) and find that when I’m tired I can’t recall how letters go the right way round.

The “life as a movie” thing is made considerably easier if you provide yourself with some sort of thing–a bracelet, a ring–to act as a camera and divide off the “movie” from the rest of reality. I would look through a bracelet on the school bus, to the annoyance of many of my busmates, one of whom finally grabbed my bracelet and stuffed it down his pants. After that, I decided to use my imagination.

When I’m nervous about a conversation, I rehearse it beforehand, often aloud.

I used to play Tetris in my head when I was bored. Then I played 3D Tetris. Now I play Hoyle’s Gravity Tiles.

I breathe to the beats of songs, and when I’m walking and somebody drives by with a loud stereo, I walk to their beat. I push my glasses up on my nose. I graph equations in my head, then make solids of rotation of them and try to find the volume.

When I’m faced with a decision, I try to diagram it logically and assign variables. I once tried to develop a formula for how long you had to have been friends with a person before it was inappropriate to stop being friends without some kind of falling out.

I tie things in complicated knots.

When I’m looking at something with a pattern of diamonds or checkers, i try to figure out the biggest square that I can visualize superimposed on the pattern without making a mark to record where the square started. That one’s hard to explain, but I bet if anyone else does it, they’ll recognise it.

I can’t think of any more right now, but I’m sure they’re there. I wish I just had a nice car runner and didn’t feel like a weirdo with so many compulsions.

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I, unlike countless hundreds, do not have a car runner. However, when I’m a passenger in a vehicle I always try to see how many yellow lines I can count without skipping over one, as the car goes over them. Harder than it sounds.

I often find myself taking the first letter of each word in a sentence or phrase to see if a word is created. Example: Last time I went to see a movie with my friend, she said “Popcorn is good for you”, and I had the word “PIGFY” stuck in my head for a week.

Maybe this isn’t so weird, but when I’m driving I crank up Hank Williams or David Allan Coe and sing as loud as I possibly can. Only when I’m alone, of course.

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My wife does this all the time.

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I imagine myself driving some sort of off-road racing buggy through the ditch or on the median alongside the car. I find ramps and things to use to jump the vehicle over driveways and obstacles, while making sure to find a safe place to land.

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I also have a variation on the car-runner thing. When driving in the rain I imagine the windsheild wipers as two men. As they move back and forth it looks like the left one is taking somehing off the shelf and bending down to put it on the floor, as the right one picks it up again moves it to the oher side of the car. On a long rainy trip them two dudes move hudreds of boxes fro one side of the car to the other.

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sory, i ned a nw keybord!!

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This has got to be a record thread for de-lurking, lurkers!

I have lots of weird habits, but I’m not telling you nutjobs about them. Also, I can’t think of any right now, other than the white noise thing when I go to sleep.

129

Well I just think all of you are nuts.

But then, so am I…

  • My memory isn’t very good, which is frustrating. So now for some reason I’ve got the Star Trek computer voice in my head (Majel Barrett-Roddenberry) helping me out. (I know…)
    When I try to recall something I know will take some time (like a password I don’t use often, although I’ve got a briliant memory for passwords) she just says ‘working’ or ‘accessing’. And if I decide I’ve forgotten she’ll say ‘unable to comply’ or ‘insufficient data’.
    Unfortunately, this ‘unable to comply’ now pops up a bit too often. Like when I can’t find the right key to my front door within a picosecond. C’mon bitch, cut me some slack!

  • Most things I do without talking are accompanied by tunes from Gilbert & Sullivan, usually from The Mikado. Especially walking and riding my bike. Though I think that’s not so unusual, it’s just the kind of music one likes that get’s played when the mind is on auto-pilot, right? Used to be far worse, what with television theme songs. Inspector Gadget, Knight Rider… glad I got rid of them!

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I have to make sure all pictures hanging on walls are straight and lamp shades. No matter whose house or place they are in.

Have to make the bed right when I get up in the morning with the duvet pattern exactly placed.:smiley:

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I also hate stepping on cracks, although I´ve never heard that “breaking your mother´s back”-stuff in my life…
except, if I accidentally step on a crack, I have to do it with the other foot as well on the same spot. I´m quite obsessive about this symmetry thing, bumps have to be replicated, just as cazzle says, but also if I scratch an itchy spot, the equivalent spot on the opposite side has to be scratched as well, otherwise it starts itching. Rather troublesome at times…

I also prefer odd numbers, I don´t really like seeing even numbers, e.g. in the volume control. I think I even prefer prime numbers, as 13 is okay, and 17, but I don´t like 15…
Sometimes I count my steps in sets of 7.

These are things I need to do, otherwise it doesn´t feel right. Sometimes I´ll close a door, then open it again and grip the handle in a way that it feels right and then close it. Not only doors, just about everything.

These aren´t really habits, just weird pastimes: I like watching the moving spots on the inside of my eyelids - especially if I look at the sun for a moment first, this gives you some really psychedelic colour effects :slight_smile:
When I´m bored, I´ll turn license plate numbers into equations - though you normally need 5 digits for this to work out nicely. e.g. 53722: (5+3-7)x2=2. I used to do this regularly as a kid, nowadays it´s just when I´m bored.

I see places and buildings I know in a sort of layered double-vision: the way I perceived them the first time I saw, and on top of that the way I see them now that I know them well, which is often smaller and quite different. e.g. there´s this regular red wooden house in my hometown which I always see as a looming building in the snowy wintery night because that´s the way I saw it for the first time.

Weird… I didn´t know anybody else did the symmetry stuff…

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I used to imagine the windshield wipers as people when I was a kid, too, only they were bowing to each other.

I thought of some others:

  • I used to carry on imaginary conversations in the bathroom when I was little. You see, we had a chest of drawers for towels and such in front of the toilet in our bathroom a while ago. I’d imagine the knobs as faces or people or something and carry on conversations. Really inane ones, but now I still get flashes where I think of a doorknob or something like that as a person.

  • Each of my toys (the little ones, action figures, toy animals, etc) had a distinct personality. I remember all the cats, like cheetahs and tigers and such, had a kind of childlike, rascal personality, probably because I loved The Lion King as a kid and Simba’s personality stuck with me. When I would have large groups of my toys playing together, there would often be a “good” side and an “evil” side. They had to be equal, or at least only vary by one or two. So I’d add good little toys to the bad side but never change their personality. Now when I find these toys lying around in my room, having been there for ages, I still think of them by their personalities.

  • I just realized I do this today. If I walk in a bathroom and someone’s just flushed the toilet, about to come out, or if the door is creaking open, I need to be in a stall before that person is out. I’m not sure why, it’s just a habit, and has nothing to do with people seeing me…I think.

  • On long car rides I’ll look for specific occurences of something–say, how many times a green object appears in a given amount of time.

  • Also on long car rides on freeways, but not so much anymore, I used to imagine we were in a race. The starting point was wherever we’d gotten on the freeway, and the ending point was our destination (or whenever we left the freeway). I’d always feel a surge of victory when we passed some car and feel defeated whenever anyone passed us.

  • I’ve already described my car runner (nondescript boy able to defy all laws of gravity) so I won’t again. Oops.

I was an imaginative kid…

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I don’t have a little bouncy-ball thing in the corner of my mind, but…

When I was four or five I used to go over to a neighbor kid’s house to play. One day she and I spent a quarter-hour or so building “sandcastles” (dirtcastles, really) in her backyard by the castor-bean plant. There was nothing remarkable or memorable about this. But from that day to this, whenever I’m deep in thought, or concentrating on a problem or working on a project, in one corner of my mind I am five years old, building dirtcastles next to the castor-bean plant with Cindy. This has been going on for forty years now.

I, too, tell myself stories before I drift off to sleep–ONE story, actually, that continues like a serial. I’ve been doing this since I was maybe eleven or twelve. There are characters in my story that have been around since then–but they’re older now, of course.

I talk to myself frequently, but not audibly: my lips move and I provide suitable facial expressions. Fortunately, I do a lot of freelance acting work when I’m not at my “regular” job. When a coworker catches me talking to myself, I always say, “Running my lines. Can’t get this one damn speech memorized.” Works every time.

When I’m in an especially boring or stupid meeting at work, I find that I must express my frustration or go nuts. The silent lip-moving won’t fly there, so I just write, stream-of consciousness style, on my notepad: MY GOD HOW LONG MUST THIS GO ON OH PLEASE SHUT UP FOR GOD’S SAKE SHUT UP I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU, etc… I do this with a thoughtful, attentive look on my face–and I don’t write in Roman letters, but in the futhorc, or runic alphabet. Anyone seeing my notepad thinks I’m just doodling as I thoughtfully visualize my goals.

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At work, I toss up my pen and catch it, incessantly. It has to flip end-over-end twice or it doesn’t count. The number of times I’ve stabbed myself in the hand, or accidentally drawn a line down my shirt-front, is a little spooky, now I think about it. Sometimes I use a letter-opener instead – this is more painful when I mis-catch.

I always make sure I know how many stairs there are in a flight of steps, so I can walk down them in the dark if I have to. Sometimes, if I’m alone, I walk down the stairs with my eyes closed, and not touching the stair-rail, to make sure. (This takes a lot of will-power the first time. No peeking!) I don’t think anyone’s ever caught me at this, but how would I know?

I use invented curses when annoyed or frustrated. For a long time “Frogs!” was my favourite, but lately it’s “Hell’s bells and monkey whistles!” I dunno, one day I just thought that “Hell’s bells” wasn’t enough, and needed a little more pizazz, and now I can’t stop it …

135

Ahh quirks…

I don’t have a runner, but I do have something a little bit similar. I always have imagined that the car was powered by the sunlight on the road. Every moment in the sun would charge this big battery that allowed the car to move. When the car would enter a shadow the battery would be drained of energy very quickly. This means that I would have to “leap” the car over the shadow areas in order to keep the battery alive. The problem was the car could only leap for so long, so in a particularly large area of shadow on the road there was a chance that the car might just stop working! I would keep track of the leaping by holding my hand in a fist and lifting my thumb off from my fist and back down again. When the thumb was up the car was in the air and when it was against my fist the car would be in contact with the road again.

I used to leap the car over those stripes of tar that they use to repair the road as well.

I also have a giant laser that is able to cut through anything out of my side of the car. I could control it with the same thumb movement and would be very careful to turn it off when people were around, as I didn’t want to hurt anyone. The laser wasn’t able to cut through mountains so I had to be content with leaving a wake of downed telephone poles, houses and trees as I went.

I don’t do either of these things much any more now that I drive myself and am rarely a passenger. It’s hard to concentrate on the road AND keep the car battery from dying!

The only other odd thing I do is when I’m having trouble falling asleep. Sometimes when I’m working on a difficult problem at work I will have the problem rolling around in my head. When I realize that there is no way I’ll just be able to drift off I mentally put myself in the middle of a huge lake or ocean. I know it’s massive but it’s hard to say why, because the body of water is perfectly black and completely smooth. Whenever I have a thought that isn’t of this ocean or lake it creates a ripple on the surface of the water that reflects some light source I can’t see. It results in the water turning into hundreds of splinters of light that die off as the ripple disappears. Usually by the time the last ripple disappears I’m asleep.

Yup, I’m a strange one.

-n

136

I do that, too, though not as much as I did when I was younger. I used to try to kind of form the freaky colors into a tunnel because to me it looked like the effects in the intro to Doctor Who.

Man, I almost feel disappointed that I missed out on so many quirks. Of course, if I had ALL of these habits, I’d truly be a basket case.

137

Whew…I definitely had to come out of lurking for this one.

First off, as opposed to having a car-runner, I tap my toes along with changes along the road. Most of the time, I lift my toes for streets or driveways, and lower them when next to grass or sidewalks. I also vary this for street lines or shadows, depending on the road.

Also, if there’s a speck of something on the windshield, I sometimes imagine that it’s drawing a line across the trees, or whatever else I see beyond the windshield.

When I was little, I used to do the blanket thing, pretending that I’m having to cover up to protect myself.

I also almost always have a song in my head, normally something I’ve heard recently, though. I talk to myself a lot of the time if I’m walking somewhere. I used to imagine scenarios for myself…my favorite was this one where I had superpowers, and I would join a team of super heroes. I read too many comic books as a child, I think.

Let’s see…I’m beginning to feel really nuts, because there’s a lot of stuff that I haven’t consciously thought about before. When looking through papers, I have a tendency to start coloring in all the letters that have an enclosed shape. I also have a tendency to close my eyes as tightly as I can, and then I watch the patterns of “light” that I see while they’re closed…the eye-floaters, I think someone called them. I also grind my teeth to rhythms…I was a drummer for the marching band in high school, and I got quite good at grinding my teeth along with what I was playing. When I don’t do that, I tap my fingers on surfaces, or I snap my fingers in a rhythm. When I see numbers together, I add them until I get to a single number. I bite my fingernails, I chew on my lips, I peel dead skin off of my feet with nail clippers.

Wow…I think that’s about it. That seems pretty nuts, when you look at it all at once…but I guess it’s fairly normal since everyone else here does this kind of stuff, too.

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This is my first post, and I’m so glad I have found other people with strange habits too!

I also do the my-life-is-a-movie thing, but its more important for me to imagine the soundtrack. Selecting pieces of music for certain situations.

This I used to do all the time, now I only do sometimes: when setting the alarm on my hi-fi, or on my pager, anything with digital display, I had to set the time at anything but the 10s and 5s, eg 08:32, or 07:56, 07:49 etc, coz 07:45 or 08:50 etc weren’t allowed.

i also add up the digits on car license plates, or look for patterns in the numbers, and if the numbers are nice, it pleases me.

I have this strange ability to remember phone numbers and ID numbers, probably because they have a rhythm coz they come in 7s. Remembering my friends ID numbers just freaked them out too much so I had to stop.

When walking I try not to step in the joining between tiles. Not so much cracks that bother me. I imagine the tiles are stepping stones and if my foot isn’t completely on a tile, I will slip and fall into the abyss.

When I talking I used to imagine the keystrokes on the keyboard, typing out the words. Now that I send text messages on my mobile/cellphone more often, I imagine typing my messages on the phone keypad instead.

And I used to wonder why people thought I was a weird kid…
:slight_smile:

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Hmm, when I’m bored I mentally sing a verse of a song, and count the beat out on one hand. 1-2-3-4-5 fingers up 5-4-3-2-1 fingers down. I keep doing this in my head, re-singing the verse until it’s finished with either all fingers up or all fingers down. THis is kinda hard to explain, and I have no idea why I do it, but sometimes it just helps to counteract boredom…

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I also click my teeth to a beat. I usually don’t click the rythm of a song, but I make up cadences and march to them in the 8-to-5 step pattern.

It puts me to sleep, too.