Oh, I never had anyone give me a hard time about it, either…and it never seemed like a big deal to me. I just think it is pretty unusual for someone in my age group (40) to have never even smoked pot. In fact, it seems weirder to me now than it did back in college & I my 20s when I was around the stuff.
Something I just noticed tonight: I have a 5-disc DVD player, and I typically get 3 DVDs from Netflix every week, and when I load them into the player I put them in the order of preferred viewing. It makes me happiest when the movie I want to watch first is in the “1” space, but sometimes I’ll be working my way through a TV series or something and the first space or two will be filled. Similar things get grouped together, though, and I will rearrange the discs to make it so: if I have more than one disc from a movie or TV show they will be next to each other, with the third one removed (if necessary) to make room for the Netflix discs – which, as I mentioned, will be in order by viewing preference.
I don’t go so far as to have to actually watch the movies in that order, though. This week I have The Devil Wears Prada in the “1” space, The Illusionist in “2,” and Little Miss Sunshine in “3”: I watched #1 last night, but watched #3 tonight. I’m saving The Illusionist for the weekend. 
I cannot describe to you how exciting it is to be formally recognized as the amoeba I was born to be!
I reduce things. I straighten paperclips and coathangers, and then attempt to snap the metal into equal sized pieces. I shred paper napkins into equal sized strips of paper, and then tear those strips into smaller and smaller squares. Then I hide the pieces in my pocket.
I have an epic and very active fantasy life. I have several different stories going at once, generally relating to what I’m reading. (I’m currently lost in Antartica. More exciting than it sounds.)
When I’m going up or down stairs, I like them to be in multiples of four, which is odd, because I dislike the number four, and almost all multiples of it. I’ve been known to skip the last stair or two if it’s a long staircase, otherwise I have a sense of wasted potential.
I’m fairly convinced I’m actually a character in a teen novel. I started thinking about this when I was no longer actually a teenager.
I worry sometimes that people can hear the horrible things that I’m thinking. I spend a lot of my time silently apologising to any psychics that I may have offended.
Okay, I have to add a few things. You people are out-weirding me, and I can’t have that happen. So…[ul][li]I have great difficulty in ‘assembling’ an image of someone in my mind, when I first meet them. It takes a deliberate act of will for me to remember someone’s face, attach their name, add their voice, etc, to form a complete impression, even though I may remember those things individually. And even then, if something changes drastically, such as a hairstyle, I will probably not recognise them. In such cases, I need to hang back, listen to their voice, see their mannerisms, and deduce who it probably is. If I am around someone for four months or so, I will probably be able to recognise them.[/li]
I didn’t know this was not normal until two weeks ago, when my counselor described how he forms a complete multifaceted impression of people as he meets them, withoput apparent effort… and that most people do that.
This adds quite a bit to the explanations of why I’ve had difficulty in social situations.
[li]I usually like to eat my food separated: gravy on the meat, but not on the mashed potatoes, for example. Lately, though, I’ve become more flexible on this.[/li]
[li]I have a colplete set of sounds that I play in my head when passing barrier fencing along the highway. Individual warning posts get ‘meh’ ‘meh’, ‘meh’; posts joined by cables get ‘mee-mee-mee’, and those segmented metal barriers on posts get ‘mrem-mrem-mrem’. When I was a kid, I used to say them out loud.[/li]
[li]I also used to say ‘bridge’ when we crossed a bridge, and drag it out for as long as the bridge lasted: ‘briiiiiiidge…’. I was cured of this when we drove south and crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel.[/li]
[li]I used to make ‘railway tracks’, complete with switches and sidings, in the snow in the back yard, then spend hours shunting imaginary trains around them.[/li]
[li]When I’m at the gym, I count (in my head) the number or reps for an exercise in multiples of four. I blame 25 years in the computer industry.[/li]
[li]I find creating indexes for my manuals to be a relaxing meditation.[/li]
[li]I still have my Lego collection. I was playing with it only last week.[/li]
[li]The sound and feel of unglazed pottery rubbing together freaks me out and makes me want to leap out the window. Heck, just thinking about it makes me uncomfortable.[/li]
I hate cheese. I mean, I really, really hate it. It almost always makes me nauseous.[/ul]
Man, where do I begin?
-For fun in the car, I’ll sing along with the song as if I were Dr. Orpheus doing karaoke. “Rock You Like a Hurricane” by the Scorpions is especially fun.
-I measure progress in the gym in fractions. On a set of 12, I think, “1/4 done, 1/3 done, 1/2 done, etc…”
-I like to read words out backwards. I especially like it if it’s a pronouncable result. Words like “when” are not as much fun because how do you say, “Nehw?”
-I have many of the food OCDs listed here. I like to eat my M&Ms categorically, either one color at a time or like it’s been posted: in an effort to equalize the colors. I like to finish each thing on my plate completely before moving on.
-I have a thing about touching. If I brush against something lightly, such as my calf brushing against a bench, I have to go back and “scratch” myself on that thing in the same way. I must rub that part of my calf hard against the part of the bench that it touched. I can resist this urge, but it’s like leaving an itch unscratched.
I also have this problem, possibly to an even greater degree. My brain has tremendous difficulty attempting to match features on a general level. I could not, for example, have any hope in hell of ever matching a police sketch to anyone unless the sketch was extremely detailed as if taken from a photograph and drawn by a good artist. If I know someone well enough I can definitely handle changes in hair styles/colours or facial hair or whatever, but if I’ve only met them once or twice I’ll probably have difficulty remembering them.
[quote=Sunspace]
[li]When I’m at the gym, I count (in my head) the number or reps for an exercise in multiples of four. I blame 25 years in the computer industry.[/li][/quote]
Multiples of four? I’d have thought you’d count in hex, or work your way along the bit values (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64…) 
[quote=Sunspace]
[li]I still have my Lego collection. I was playing with it only last week.[/li][/quote]
Dude! Lego is still cool. Geeky maybe, but who cares? I used to make real working transformers (the “robots in disguise,” not the electrical contraptions) out of my lego when I was a kid. I always complained that I never had enough hinge pieces.
[quote=Sunspace]
[li]The sound and feel of unglazed pottery rubbing together freaks me out and makes me want to leap out the window. Heck, just thinking about it makes me uncomfortable.[/li][/quote]
I don’t think this is very strange. It’s kind of a fingernails-on-a-blackboard thing for me, too, the squeaky glass-on-glass-like sound drives me up the freakin’ wall. Much like fork tines scraped along a plate. shudder
Phew, I’m not as weird as I thought…
[ul]
[li]I have to sleep withthe covers firmly tucked under my feet, but with my arms out no matter how cold it is.[/li][/ul] [ul]
[li]Wind-up watches go all doo-lally when I wear them.[/li][li]Pictures hanging at angles drive me insane, I straighten out pictures in friends’ houses and restaurants. I just can’t be in a room with a crooked picture. Even if I turn my back I know it is there, at a jaunty angle, laughing at my pain…[/li][li]I can’t go anywhere without knowing I have a book with me to read. I just can’t.[/li][li]I dislike shopping, have little interest in clothes or shoes, but let me loose in a stationery shop and you will have to drag me kicking and screaming from those coloured paper-clips and funky shaped post-its.[/li][li]I too, love a good chat with myself, preferably out loud.[/li][li]I don’t hear voices before I go to sleep, but when I am trying to decide something I do have a ‘good’ voice and a ‘bad’ voice in my head who do the debating for me.[/li][li]Any film that has a beheading/hanging/drowning gives me the heebie-jeebies, I also am very uncomfortable having anything tight around my neck. No polo necks for me![/li][li]I have a low body temperature and so rarely ever have a fever, it means I am sick for longer and tend to feel the cold. I also have doctors telling me I am not really sick because I don’t have a high enough fever.[/li][li]Me too for dreams about my teeth falling out. They seem to come in moments of stress. I dream my teeth have crumbled and fallen out, I can taste the pieces in my mouth. Then I wake up and realise it was true! Then I really wake up and realise that the last time I only dreamt I woke up.[/li][/ul]
I am sure there is more, but I am pleased to be in such good company…
I think that this is because 4 is the largest multiple of two that fits into the brain’s ‘largest comprehended all at once’ quantity of “5 plus-or-minus 2”.
And now that we can order Lego in bulk over the internet…
I don’t like pointy numbers. I was actually dreading the new year because of this. I hate 7 more than the all the other pointy numbers (1, 4, and sometimes 5).
I hate, hate, hate live Christmas trees. I think it is really mean to cut down a tree, take it inside and decorate it, and convince it that it is special, only to throw it away after a week or two. Poor tree.
—I just spent the last week or two designing, building, painting (including nose art), arming, and writing a fictional development and combat deployment history of, a simulated version of the fighter-bomber that appears in Pearl Jam’s animated music video “Do the Evolution.” Said aircraft appears in just under two seconds of footage, in maybe two or three markedly different cels.
It is based on the A-4 Skyhawk, except that it is an autogyro (well, technically, a gyrodyne) piloted by a skeleton. (Illustration here.)
Why did I do it? Because…I wanted to. It was neat.
—I have reoccuring nightmares about getting my beard shaved off.
—I’ve made mix CDs of fanfic soundtracks. Fanfic that I’ve written…and haven’t published yet.
—Yeah…I write fanfic. Some of it’s been quite well received, so far.
I have a a dream like that beard shaving one of Ranchoth… I have long hair, that I wear in a ponytail a lot and I dream every now and then that a stranger runs up to me and cuts off my pony tail.
My other weirdness is that I’m almost 30 and I’m still scared of the dark and hate to sleep by myself . I’m married so I don’t usually have to now. Growing up I had my own room and no sisters so it was a problem. I do have a twin brother and I ended up with him most of the time. I slept in the bed with him until we were about 16 and out grew his bed, then I just moved one of those fold out cube bed things in to his room and slept on that. My room was right next door, beautifully decorated with a nice comfortable queen sized bed, that was rarely used.
I also have duck feet and have nightmares about my teeth falling out.
You people with food issues, however, are weird and possibly dangerous.
I have a very active Mary Sue-style fantasy life. I haven’t seen (or, er, read any yaoi fanfic about) Weiss Kreuz for years, but I’ve still got a little story in my head going on about it.
Sometimes when I’m lying in bed I get this sudden sense that I’ve either grown very small or very large, and possibly segmented or chitinous. It’s kind of like vertigo. I don’t like it.
I wake up extremely disoriented sometimes. It scares the hell out of my boyfriend, who is halfway convinced I have a second personality. He calls it Rabbit, from that book. I just get really cranky and insecure because I wake him up halfway in the throes of a dream, and he asks me what the hell is going on, and meanwhile I’ve been waking up enough to forget so I get defensive and snap at him to go back to sleep. Sometimes I make noises. He’s afraid one day I’ll shoot him. For some reason I’ve given him reason to believe Rabbit is a near-future child soldier in the Third World somewhere. He honestly and actively thinks there’s something the matter with me and Rabbit.
I can’t stand to see hypodermic injections on TV, but when they’re drawing blood from me or doing something else like that I can’t not look. And it isn’t disturbing to me to see it done to myself.
“Me, too” on the tooth dreams. A variant is that my mouth is full of some substance, and, no matter how much of it I pull out, there’s always more. (Since I’ve been in good dental health, however, these dreams have stopped.)
I don’t watch TV, for no other reason than we have one TV in our house, it’s in the family room, and I hate the family room. It’s dank and uncomfortable. When I visit my sister, watching TV with her is a wonderful treat. I miss a lot of cultural references because I don’t watch TV. The “water cooler” chat about Gray’s Anatomy or whatever goes right over my head.
When I am by myself in the car for a trip longer than 20 minutes or so, I run my iPod through my car stereo system and sing. I sing along with everything from the Eagles to Duruflé. If it’s a trip of several hours, I will sometimes arrive at my destination hoarse.
Ooooh, it is so comforting to be in such good company.
Sometims I wake up and there is an almost complete book or article (often of the Newsweek one-page variety) that I have made up in my head. They are always on topics I was not particularly thinking about. I am not a writer, nor do I consciously aspire to be one. I never wake up with a song or movie. Some of the books and articles have seemed pretty good, but I have never actually typed one up.
I love BtVS but have only seen the show a few times. I read the entire 7 seasons’ transcripts online. I have Tivo and could record it or watch it live (I think it is on here 2 times a day) but I don’t, and I have major Spike lust.
I refused to tell my kid there was a Santa Claus.
I’m pretty sure I’m a character in someone’s (God’s?) video game.
If there were telepaths, I would probably be able to drive them insane or kill them with my weird random thoughts and the stupid songs that get stuck in my head.
:eek:
It takes me a long time to learn to recognize someone, too. If I see someone at, say, a family reunion, for a few hours, and don’t see them again for another year, I’m not going to remember them when I see them again. I have to be around someone for a long period of time before I’ll recognize them when I see them again.
Oh well, at least now I know why my mom expected me to remember people from one family reunion to another.
Everybody has that problem to one degree or another, or at least that’s what the people at LensCrafter’s told me when they had to adjust my new glasses to fit me. They seemed to think it’s caused by your nose being slightly asymmetrical, as opposed to your ears being at different heights.
My main recurring nightmare involves a terrifying and precarious climb up or down a ladder, a cliff or some tall structure. The thing is, I don’t suffer from vertigo IRL.
I’m 5 or 6 inches taller than my husband.
I’m right-handed but left-footed. At school, I always had to take the high jump from the other direction.
I shaved my head once, just for the hell of it.
Positively humdrum, compared to some of you lot.
Is this because you’re really tall, he’s really short, or a combination of the two? What are your heights?
This didn’t seem odd when I first read it, but now it’s melting my brain.
Got pix? I think women with shaven heads are often very attractive, and I’d like to (chastely and from a distance) admire you.
I hope you don’t take this as condescending, but I find this absolutely adorable. And think of it often, at random times… like when I’m at the supermarket, for example.
I’m quite tall, but not freakishly so - just under 5’8". He’s very short for a bloke - 5’2".
I had some photo-booth shots taken for posterity at the time, which was like 20 years ago, but ten house moves and four countries later I have no idea where they are. I also remember a friend taking some photos, but I’d have to ask him if he still has them somewhere. It did look striking, to say the least.