I thoight I was the only one with this quirk! My sister used to chase me arounhd the house with cotton balls in her mouth! It drove me nuts!
I, like bibliophage hate phones. I think they are the most impersonal invention ever created and should be banned by the US government. I will never use a phone if I can avoid it. I’m at a college, so that makes it easy. I am NEVER confortable calling people unless they are close friends, and even then I make the calls quick.
But I love e-mail, IM, message boards, etc…I suppose it’s because of the fact that I don’t hear them, and so I get the feeling of non-closeness. I don’t know, I’m odd.
Also, when I sleep, unless it’s really cold or really hot I will only use the quilt for covering. I have the fitted sheet below me, and the quilt on top. The regular sheet is always in a heap at the foot of the bed.
I actually just realized this today. When I’m eating chips, I have to shove the whole thing in my mouth. I can’t bite into a chip. It just seems wrong. So I get lots of weird looks from people while trying to cram Doritos in.
I prefer to shower in the dark.
This is a rather new discovery for me. I really can’t stand bright lights when I first wake up. They make my whole face and head hurt. A few months ago I tried it with the lights out. It’s not completely dark, since we have windows in the bathroom. But it is still night time when I get up each day.
This has a reasonable explanation but when I am nervous or tired I start to twitch.
When I have the feeling somebody might be following me I search for my keys in my pocket (cause you could scratch somebodies face with them… Mc Gyverish, huh?)
I am a chicken vegetarian. I hate meat. Chicken is not meat. Fish is meat. But thunafish is not. So I guess thunafish and chicken are fish, and I am a vegetarian.
I have a very strange way of being logic (see above)
dodgy
Silk has that effect for me. I cant stand the way it feels on skin… silk cushions and silk scarfs make me shiver… eeeeeek! Nasty!
dodgy
A few of mine…
I can’t hold anything in my mouth. Say if I come home from grocery shopping and I need to pull off my glove to find the keys in my pocket. I always make the mistake of pulling my glove off with my teeth and I always gag. It’s nasty.
Warning! TMI follows
If I have to go to the bathroom in the middle of breakfast (or any other meal) for number 2, I cannot go back to the table and eat. Gross!
I just thought of another one which is really starting to bother me because I just can’t avoid it.
When I laugh, I sometimes laugh so hard that tears roll down my cheeks. Not strange yet? Well, if I can’t stop laughing at that point I’ll start crying instead. For real. I’ll just start to feel really sad and before I know it I’m sobbing away like a crazy person. It’s really uncomfortable, especially for the poor person who made me laugh in the first place. It doesn’t happen all the time, but if I laugh because I’m being tickled I will cry. Please tell me I’m not the only one…
Tickling can make me cry too -
but usually I just hit the tickler unconcious 
dodgy
I can’t tear lettuce…it makes my teeth hurt! If I want a salad I have to buy a bag of the “pre-torn” stuff.
If I am being weighed I have to do it three times (very O-C). Thank God my doctor has a very patient nurse.
I MUST tell my kids that I love them before parting - whether it is dropping them off at school or if they are going out in the yard to play. Drives the little buggers crazy and makes their friends think I’m the weirdest mom in the world.
I can’t stand the feel of corduroy, velvet, or anything that feels like them. My kids can’t have any corduroy clothes. I don’t like to get jewelry as presents because it always comes in a velvet-covered box.
Unfortunately, most car upholstery is made of fabric that I find creepy. I have to keep my hands carefully away from the seat. When I bought my last vehicle, I made my selection based almost entirely on which car had the least-creepy upholstery. Sometimes I put a towel or a sheet over the seat, especially when I’m wearing shorts.
I also can’t stand to handle bags of sugar. When the sugar is packaged in paper that’s sort of glossy, it doesn’t bother me; it’s the regular paper bags that freak me out. I will pay more for sugar packaged with glossy paper. It has something to do with the dry, granular-underneath texture. Bags of flour don’t bother me because they don’t have that granular feel.
This quirk has extended to include a distaste for walking barefoot in dry sand. Wet sand’s fine, wearing shoes in sand is okay, but I get the heebie-jeebies when I walk in dry sand barefoot.
I cant walk through grass barefoot. It gives me the creeps.
Another good thread!
I don’t like to walk into a dark room where there is a mirror. I need to turn a light on.
Long time reader, first time posting.
I can’t stand the feel of walls. Just regular walls, that have that sort of powdery feeling to them. It’s okay if they’re painted with glossy paint, but otherwise it really makes me cringe and gives me bad chills. I can’t watch other people touching them either.
When I’m walking on a sidewalk, I try to step in each square twice or less. I get points depending on how many times I step in each square. If I step in it once, I get a point, twice, no points, and three times, I lose a point, four times, I lose two points, and so on. Points are good.
When I do something like stub my toe or scratch my arm, I have to “balance it out” by doing the same thing on the other side of my body. However, after I stub my right toe (and balance it out by stubbing my left toe) my left toe has more of the sensation of being stubbed, having been stubbed more recently, and I have to stub it again, and then the right one. Since it hurts my left toe more to be stubbed twice in a row and my right toe has been stubbed more recently, it balances out better… sort of.
I’m normal…
Visual inspection of nasal effluvia. Sorry sensitive dopers! I can’t help it, I must look at it/them. Just immediately discarding that Kleenex won’t do! Mrs. margorp doesn’t appreciate this one very much so it has become a private ritual.
As per DrewG27 I also have the occupied? bathroom privacy issue, especially at work where the ‘attendees’ are likely to be known to me. This one may have a deep genetic component, as I have noted excretory defensiveness syndrome in some pet species (esp. felines). I can understand how a human (cornered with pants around ankles) would feel subconsciously threatened but how did we get this way?
vengeance and dust: sounds like a mild case of OCD. Probably nothing unless the self abuse component gets out of control.
LOL vengence!
Again I am realizing another quirck…
My boyfriend has this strong believe :rolleyes: that stepping on a duct-cover (right word?) means bad luck. - However if there are two in a row and you step on them, that is good luck - three bad luck - 4 good luck. There are never more than four in a row on English pavements it seems.
First it didnt bother me - only that he told me whenever I had stepped into bad luck - so I started to push him towards bad luck duct-covers whenever I saw one. Never managed to get him to step into one though(only once when he was totally stoned he stepped into tons of them - but tat wasnt my fault 
…)
Anyways - now I constantly find myself avoiding duct covers. The shitty thing is that the lucky once dont exist in Austria. There are never two in a row here in Austria.
Gonna write tot he governement about it… I want lucky duct-covers! AND I WANT THEM NOW!
dodgy
Silver Fire:
**
I live just south of the Mackinac Bridge, spanning Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas. It’s 5 miles long, across where the tops of Great Lakes Michigan and Huron link.
Enough people are freaked about driving over it that they have bridge staff who will take the wheel for people and drive them across, while they close their eyes, get into the fetal position, or whatever.
There was a show on The Vacation Channel awhile back that made note of it. The host then, for fun, went back to the bridge between New York and New Jersey and told the toll guy he was nervous about driving across. Could an employee please drive him over?
“Looks like you’re staying in Jersey,” the guy said.
One of my many weird quirks that I was just thinking about: I like to sleep with the TV on at night - it helps me fall and stay asleep, for some reason.
I won’t, however, leave it on any channel that turns into infomercials at like 4:30 a.m. I just don’t like the idea of the hawking of bad products infiltrating my dreaming brain (why I’m not concerned about otherwise junky television shows and movies doing so, I can’t tell you).
You’d be surprised how difficult it is to find a channel that doesn’t switch to infomercials. A&E is one of the few networks I’ve found.
As far as bathroom etiquette goes, I can pee in front of other people (well, people I know, not just anybody who wanders in off the street) but I cannot blow my nose in view of anyone else. I must be in a perfectly private place to do that. My husband is just the opposite: he can blow his nose anywhere, but we’ve been married almost 12 years and he can’t pee if I’m nearby. He can’t even pee if he thinks I can hear him pee.
The thought of having a cotton ball in my mouth TOTALLY freaks me out. Something about the feeling of it under my teeth… It’s weird I know, but it must be the same kind of thing as those yarn people 
I also cannot stand the thought of a balloon popping nearby. When it does, it’s fine, but if one’s near me, I tell everyone to be REALLY careful. It’s very strange, and I get bugged a lot, but oh well :).
Whenever I try to get to sleep, my mind always makes me hear footsteps. It’s like I’m going to be attacked or robbed every night. It happens less now, but it freaks me out everytime. However, if the light is on, no one can hurt me.
I always have to check the bathroom when I take a shower. I have this delusional Psycho image that I’m going to be stabbed to death. Same thing happens with baths, but only if I have to close my eyes (to wash my hair etc.). This is the first time I’ve acknowledged it.
That’s all for now.