These threads always make me feel better.
If I touch something with, say, my right pinky finger, my left pinkey finger will hurt until I touch it to the the object. Let’s say while doing that I accidentily touch it twice with the left pinky and with my left middle finger, now I have to even it up. All touches must be symmetrical in type (whether swipe or tap), number and duration.
Thankfully that takes up SO much time that I haven’t been able to have any others.
Here’s a real weird one…I’m told the great dr. Samuel Johnson had the same habit! When I walk down the sidewalk, I consciously try to avoid stepping on a crack! I don’t know why, but I always do this…am I sick?
Every day before leaving for work or anywhere, I unplug my clock radio, and bedside lamp. Both are relatively new. I believe that my apartment will burn down if I leave them on. All other appliances don’t faze me. Therapy anyone…
I do that too.
I also have to tie my shoes so that they are almost equally tight. Sometimes I spent 10 minuted doing this.
I like to put my M&Ms in a glass of milk, wait for the milk to turn colors, drink the milk then eat the candy out of the bottom of the glass.
Without milk, I eat M&Ms in color order: brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue.
When I see numbers, I think of race car drivers. For instance, the combination to my high school locker wasn’t 28-12-24, it was Ricky Rudd-Jeremy Mayfield-Jeff Gordon. I can’t remember them if I try to think of just the numbers. I gave the combination to a friend once so she could borrow my coat, and I told it to her in code, and had to stop and write it down so I could remember the actual numbers.
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Interesting. I usually do this too. I have assumed, though, that it is a sort of rebellion. My mother always made me eat everything on my plate and now I don’t have to.
Mix my mashed potatoes and my corn together.
Cannot stand the sound of someone finishing a popcicle (teeth scraping on the popcicle stick)
Cannot stand the sound of silverware scraping on a plate or on teeth.
Check under the toliet seat before I sit down cause my mother flushed a huge spider down the toliet when I was young and I was always afraid it would come back up and bite me.
I like to force my feet and my hands into cramps, hard to explain, hehe.
yes! i love these threads…i first became a doper when i read one and realized you are all my people 
i eat paper. all the coerners of my books used to be torn off (library books too, shh). but now i think that’s tacky so i eat notebook paper in little scraps while i read instead. it’s just nice to have something to chew while you read, you know?
i fingerspell (sign language) my thoughts. my hand will move without me wanting it to at the moment when i need to look normal, or impress someone, and it’s always “what the hell are you doing?” i guess it’s noticeable.
if i remember an embarassing moment, even if it was years ago, i’ll say “ouch” out loud. i’ll just be sitting there and all of a sudden say it, and people are like, what? then THAT’s embarassing, and a future ouch moment.
i can only eat things like skittles, goldfish crackers, m&ms, in even numbers. i hate odd numbers
i CAN’T STAND when someone messes up their eyebrows. it freaks me out and i frantically smooth out my own until theirs are fixed
i used to grind my teeth to the syllables of a song or a person’s name. the entire year i was ten, i had “come one baby, do the locomotion” stuck in my head, because it was exactly ten syllables and perfect for “grinding” to.
i think you should embrace your quirks, but not come up with new ones on purpose for attention. because then i have to slap you.
I eat foods one at a time. If I have a cheese & egg bagel and some French Fries, I eat the cheese and egg first, then the bagel, then the french fries. Been doing this since I was a child.
I chew my tongue constantly. Drives everyone else crazy.
I cannot stand seeing anyone eat with a little wooden paddle. The type some ice cream cups come with. It makes me crazy. I always carry a plastic spoon in my purse so I don’t have to do it myself.
I can’t stand to see drawers and closets open. Have to close them.
Ok, I wasnt going to post before I saw yours, but I have the same fear. Rather embarrassing really. We keep our milk in jars and Im constantly afraid that the jar is broken and I might swallow pieces of glass in my milk. And I`m also afraid of swallowing safety–razors. How sick can one get, huh?
Holy shit! I thought I was the only person in the world who grinded (ground?) his teeth to songs. It drove me ex crazy when we’d be sniggling. She would feel my jaw move back and forth and tell me I was doing that ‘grindy thing again.’ A lot of the time I’ll just grind them to little beats I make up on the spot, like di-do-be-do-do-di-da-di.
I WILL NOT eat at an Outback steakhouse. Never have, and I never will. (This is not ao much a habit as it is an oath, but I still think it’s worth mentioning.)
I require something to occupy mt hands at all times. Usually it’s a pen. I spin it around my fingers without using my thumb. It was kinda trickey at first, but now I show off to people and they try to do and and fail, hehe.
I’ve always enjoyed mixing veggies into potatoes. Peas are the best.
And foot cramps – they are so cool! Controllable. Fun. Never learned how to do hand cramps, though.
-another
i fingerspell (sign language) my thoughts. my hand will move without me wanting it to at the moment when i need to look normal, or impress someone, and it’s always “what the hell are you doing?” i guess it’s noticeable.
ferrisgirl–you have made me feel normal. I have done this for a long as I can remember. It especially comes in handy when I’m leaving a room to go get something else and I’m spelling the item over and over again.
I also do a musical-teeth type thing, not really grinding, more like tapping.
When I’m on the phone with someone, and asking them to click on something, I move my hand in the air like I’m mousing to an equivalent area on a giant screen in front of me.
Kinda like that thing where you go bowling and you “lean” to get your ball to go one way or the other, except this seems to be much funnier to passers-by.
I also make weird hand gestures to go with certain words and phrases, which I can never reproduce when I’m not on the phone.
Odd habits at work…
Corr
Okay, I don’t feel like such a freak now. I do this all the time! I can still remember the tune they played when the local news came on, simply because of the number of times I used to grind my teeth (or click them together) to the tune.
I also dislike odd numbers. The volume on the stereo in my car has to be set to an even number, unless it ends in 6, in which case I’ll settle for 5, but not 7. I don’t like the number six. And when it comes to even numbers, 4 and multiples of 4 are the best.
I’ve got fine hair and the individual strands have a tendency to knot. I will run my fingers through my hair until I feel a knot, weed out the exact hair strand that it’s on, and pull it out. Then to go further, I will pull the strand until it breaks at the knot, freeing it, before I throw it away.
I’m beginning to rethink the “I don’t feel like such a freak now” comment.
Another weird hair thing. I’ve got this one hair that shows up in the back of my head from time to time. It’s short, curly, thick, and jet black, like a pubic hair that migrated to my head. When I’m looking for knots in my hair, I’ll occasionally run across that thing. I have to isolate it (which is no easy task, let me tell ya) and pull it out. I’ll generally just look at it in disbelief for a while, wondering where in the hell it came from. I know I’ve got a tiny bit of Cherokee Indian blood in me, but I don’t think that explains the one thick, jet black strand of hair in my head! 
Okay that’s all for now. I believe I’ve embarrassed myself enough.
When I’m filling a big bulb syringe with bloodworms for my fish, or even an eye dropper with brine shrimp, I catch myself creating a vacuum in my mouth, like when you’re sucking on a straw, only sans straw of course. Sort of like copying with my mouth what the rubber part of the syringe is doing with the water… odd.
The other one that is not really a habit, and that I find completely normal is occasionally parking my truck on the side of a slow road, or in a parking lot, and listening to the radio - sometimes even drink a can of pop. Sound OK to you? Yeah, me too. But it sure isn’t to people who see me sitting there alone. Roving security guards and regular people often call the police on me, to whom I explain that I’m just listening to the radio, and even they sometimes get freaked out and make me leave. You have no idea how easily morons will over-react, and fast you can get a couple cop cars jumping on your ass by doing the following:
I don’t grind my teeth to the rythm of songs… I tap my feet.
This seems to really bother people. What I do is I tap with the front of one foot, lifting up the back of that foot when tapping with the heel, then doing the same with the other foot. And I can never understand why people keep asking me to stop. It’s not as annoying as when they’re blabbering non-stop when I’m trying to get something done.
I always put down the toilet lid before flushing. This isn’t because of some request from a girlfriend or because I’m afraid of bacteria spewing out all over my bathroom, it’s just a habit. I’m a little freaked out when I find a just used toilet with a lifted lid. 
When, during a card game, someone plays three of the Kings, I can’t help but think about the movie.
-L
Well here I go with my first post to this board.
For me, I have a lot of habits related to numbers, favoring 5’s. For example, every time I fill up at the gas station, I always round the amount up to the next nickel (ending in either 5 or 0), that way I don’t wind up with any pennies. If I had more control over the amounts of my other purchases I would likely do this.
Someone mentioned not liking odd numbers and used their car stereo as an example of only setting it on even-numbered levels. My stereo goes to 35, so I tend to set it on increments of 5.
If I am doing something such as combing my hair, brishing my teeth, etc. I will count out the number of strokes or iterations and go in units of 5.
I know I could think of some other examples if I sit here longer, but none come to mind at the moment.
Another “weird habit”, if you’d call it that, is that any time I sort items that are in different colors I always observe as closely as possible the colors of the rainbow for my order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Only alphabetical or numerical order (i.e. sorting videos) would override my color-sorting system.
A couple other miscellaneous weird habits of mine:
I have to run a fan to sleep and need the “white noise.” A silent room is difficult for me to sleep in.
I tend to be obsessive/compulsive when it comes to checking to make sure things are turned off, unplugged, etc.
I have to take a break at exactly 9:00 A.M. when I am at work. Likewise, I always leave for lunch at 11:30 with little variance from day to day. Consider this a “Rain Man” sort of trait in me.
If I see a calendar that is not on the right month I will not be relaxed until it shows the current month.
I don’t like looking at pictures or other wall hangings that are not perfectly straight and will adjust them when possible.
I don’t like looking at people’s computer desktops where the icons are scattered all over the screen.
I think that’s enough of them for now.
::Sigh::
I grind my teeth all the time, but I also wiggle my fingers and toes to songs I hear in my head. I can be watching a movie and my daughter will laugh at me and point out that “I’m doing it again”. Only then will I realize I’m replaying that horrible belly-button commercial (or some other annoying tune) in my head, over and over…
I must ALWAYS have something to drink, wherever I go. Preferably sweet tea…
I must have a four game streak in Free Cell before I can go to sleep at night…
I also say “MEOW” but only when I bump into things. This comes from trying to sneak into the house as a teen. Drunkenly bumping into things and meowing, thinking I’d fool my mother into thinking the cat was lurking. For some reason I still do it. In public. And I can’t HELP IT, DAMMIT!
I haven’t eaten cereal for three years. Just decided one day that it wasn’t kosher.