Here, I forgot one about myself: my anal-retentiveness concerning spelling, typing and grammar can’t be adequately described without Godwinizing my own thread. Not content to merely ruthlessly edit my own writings, not even satisfied with smugly correcting people’s posts on the internet, I’m actually a Wikipedia Grammar Gnome. That’s right, I spend my free time surfing a totally dynamic, open encyclopedia, quietly editing as I go. With as many Wiki users as there are, and as quickly as the content of the site changes, I may as well be trying to bail out the Titanic with a plastic cup. Yet I do this anonymously and for free.
When buying a Box of Something at the store, I always take another box behind the front box, which has Front Box Contamination.
I knit. In public. And never leave home without my knitting. Ever. You just don’t know what kinda shit is waiting out there to be flung. Knitting makes everything all better.
I like opera and when at my zombie part time job, hum out ditties. Every one things I’m fucking happy all the time. wrong dwarf if I didn’t, I’d probably go all tourette’s on the customers who are ummm…more zombied than me.
If there were a job for it in our area, I’d write obits too. Interesting ones.
I have a dread fear of driving behind a car carrier. I just know that last car on top is going to bounce off and fall on me. I will slow down and change lanes to get away from the Scary Car Carriers.
Ditto for big flat bed trailers carrying uncovered loads.
I keep a mental record of the migration habits of the local birds. I remember the date that I saw the first swallow/red-breasted grosbeak/hooded merganser last Spring and I get very excited if any birds come back “early”.
I can spend hours in a creek, stream, or river turning over rocks and identifying the larval insects and crustaceans there.
But I’m a girly girl. Complete with pedicure, high heels, and skirts.
And I am too old for this, but I have a super colossal car audio system (Rockford) with a in-dash screen, 5.1 surround, with thumping bass. I like to listen to loud but perfectly imaged music. (Unless I am at a traffic light or parking lot, and then I turn it way down so I don’t offend anyone.)
I have nightmares about it. In them, I’m driving, and can sometimes see the place I’m trying to get to, but can never get there.
More dream evidence of my dorkiness: my dreams generally follow the Production Code. Explicitly sexual dreams are vanishingly rare- I can remember maybe two in the last five years. My version of the dream where you’re naked in public is that I’m out in public and can’t find my shoes, and for some reason I can’t let anyone know I’m not wearing my shoes- I have to get to them before anyone realizes. If there’s violence in my dreams, it’s never explicit- I don’t see the blood and gore. When I described some of my dreams to Mr. Neville, he was the one that came up with the idea that my dreams follow the Production Code.
I also have nightmares about driving a car off a cliff. There was a scene in Groundhog Day where Bill Murray puts the groundhog behind the wheel of a car and the car drives off a cliff- I get panicky if I watch any scene like that in a movie or on TV.
I mutter horrible curses* at stupid drivers that get on my way while I smile at them and wave to let them in.
I cringe and writhe in agony when someone talks about toenail accidents. I am curling my toes as I type this. I have had surgery 9 times on my two big toenails
*such as “I hope you flip over where nobody can find you for weeks” or “I hope you get home and find it burnt to the ground with your family inside” or “may all the worms in your mother’s coffin get sick and puke on her face”. I would never say anything like this to anyone’s face and I always let them through.
I made a conscious decision several years ago to stop using washing up liquid on my dishes in order to re-introduce a healthy amount of germs into my otherwise slightly OCD induced sanitary lifestyle.
I seem to be the only person in the world who checks text messages before sending to ensure correct spelling, grammar and punctuation. I’ll go back and retype the first word in a sentence if it has not capitalised. I never abbreviate words like ‘l8r’ ‘m8’ or stuff like that.
I ‘see’ lines wherever I go, like I imagine lines where they aren’t actually there. It’s not a random thing, it’s things like ‘if that building were longer, this line is where its front edge would be’ or other weird extrapolations like that. I tend not to step on these ‘lines’ although I’m not superstitious and don’t do it consciously.
And the best yet, I officially have a food phobia. I can’t even touch most foods that are wet, like anything with sauce on it or anything like that. I’ve never eaten meat in my life, nor vegetables with the exception of french fries and potato chips. Basically, anything that’s not cereal, bread, biscuit like or chocolate covered will make my stomach churn to the point of almost being sick.
I have Vasomotor Rhinitis . It’s not fun. Being around someone with too much perfume can send me into both a histamine reaction and vomiting. Cleaning with bleach is more or less out of the question in most applications; even a freshly cleaned room that’s had enough bleach used in it makes me feel ill.
I’m very good at identifying patterns, and am slightly OCD about it sometimes. As a child, I used to only walk in certain patterns on a section of tile floor in our house, and as an adult, it makes me point out things that are out of place and “fix” them. This can vary from lint removal to alphabetization to adjusting alignment.
Makeup can be and is a bit of a pastime for me. My current obsession is with MAC Cosmetics, and I have a Pro card. This turns a department store priced makeup into almost the same price as a lot of drug store makeup brands. I don’t wear makeup that often, but I enjoy playing with it. I don’t feel much different with or without makeup, and it’s not associated with any sort of self esteem issues. It’s just fun to play with.
My eyes have slight epicanthic folds. Epicanthic folds are most common in Asian populations as far as I know. The inherited eye shape that I have comes from my mom’s family, who are all Icelanders. Eyeliner, especially noticeable or heavy eyeliner, will emphasize the epicanthic folds’ detail. I also have a “freckle” in the iris area of my right eye.
When I get sick, my skin turns transparent and I’m almost as pale as the color of rice paper. I once had the flu and scared the crap out of my fiance after exiting the bathroom in a towel, as he could see all the veins on my exposed skin. My forearms, however, always show some vein detail in approximately this shade of blue on the undersides and inner elbows. This could possibly also be attributed to my Scandinavian background.
-I tell people that I am allergic to rice. I don’t know if it’s actually an allergy, but the smell of white rice has made me nauseous since I was a child. I have attempted time and time again to eat rice (last time it was a pilaf and I actually thought it was tasty) but end up vomiting it all back up. I have never met another soul who cannot eat rice. It’s my arch enemy.
-I am OCD about my bedsheet placement, particularly around my feet. I need the comforter to be tucked precisely about my feet and legs so that there is no outside airflow and there cannot be too much underneath them. I spend an hour every night kicking and prodding at them with my feet to get them right. Sometimes I can’t and it bothers me forever.
-I am a recovering “otherkin.” I am not proud of this but as a teenager I was silly and desperately needed something to believe in. I fell in with a crowd who bought into this shit and I was hooked by the fantasy.
-I spend a lot of time worried about my teeth, being phobic of the dentist and avoiding him, and subsequently worry about my teeth even more. Anxiety disorder mixed with dental phobia are killing me. I’d rather deal with the “known” factor of active tooth pain than the horror of the dental drill. I recently survived a crown placement, but haven’t been back since.
I do this too. It drives the Tashaboy nuts, as he’s taller than I am and therefore I take the covers and tuck them under my feet, and his feet become exposed.
According to the running thread on the subject, there are at least three of us.
My main weirdosity is that I count things, and they have to add up to numbers evenly divisible by eight. Steps before I enter a door, taps on a table, letters in a sign… I can control it, but if I don’t, I start counting. Like the diet version of OCD or something.
I am completely incapable of using a medical thermometer, despite being a college-educated adult whose parents were a doctor and a nurse. Mercury, electronic, IR-ear-type. They all fail. I rarely get a reading that is close to normal body temperature (usually around 96 or 97), and often just get … nothing. Some confused beeps with no reading, or mercury that isn’t even on the scale.
Oh, and while Adventure is great, it is number 2 to Warlords–or “Fourlords” as we call it when you have four people playing at once. A game of simple, direct brutality. Phenomenal.
For some reason I now need 4 pillows to sleep at all; one under my waist, one between my legs, one under my head and one to hold in front of me. Also I can only go to sleep on my side, usually the right (although I often wake up on my back). I have no idea why or how, and only a fuzzy idea of when, this happened to me - I used to be a normal, one-pillow, sleep on my front, kinda guy.
Thinking about the whole ear and earbuds thing earlier in this thread, and having never really examine my ears, I just did – and they are different. Quite different, in fact.
On my left ear, the region known as the Fossa of Triangularis is roughly a rounded triangle, as the Wiki image there sort of suggests, with the lower portion of the cartilage splitting off a good ways from the top portion as it approaches the head. On my right ear, however, the Fossa is very narrow, coming almost to a point, creating a narrow fissure instead of a bowl-like depression. As a result, the lower portion of the cartilage which I suppose normally works to kind of hold the earbuds in the Concha region doesn’t in my right ear, not as well, anyway.
This may also explain why, when using my Shure IEMs with the foam tips I can hear music perfectly and equally in both ears, but when wearing over-ear or on-ear headphones there’s a slight disparity between the left and right ear; the sound doesn’t bounce around quite the same way in one ear as it does in the other.
And because of my professed weirdness, I now find this rather fascinating.
I sleep all bundled up to my neck (sheet, blanket, comforter) except for my feet which must always be free.
I like grape jelly mixed into my milk.
I drink a 44oz (like what delis serve large iced teas in) coffee (with 1/2-1/2 & sugar) every work day. If I don’t, I feel like the entire day is wasted.
I whistle for my cat, and she comes. (but it must be the Addams Family theme, or she doesn’t budge) (tho that may be more my cat’s weirdness than mine).
