Oh, I also refuse to exercise outdoors at night. I will not ever exercise in the dark. It stems back to when I was so anxious/depressed some years back, went jogging at night, and got so worked up that I thought I was hearing bells, but there were no bells! I dont even think it was a real auditory hallucination, but the fact it could have been got me even more worked up.
So yeah, if you wanna be my jogging partner, it’s daytime or nothin’
My list goes something like this:
–I eat the best stuff last
–Count the steps going up and down
–Arrange things in multiples of 2, 3 or 5
–Always say"Poor Schmuck" when I see a car broken down in my direction on the highway
–All CDs face up in the case (back in the days of cassettes, they had to be at the beginning of side 1)
Oh absolutely. My dad’s home theater system goes up to 50. There’s gotta be some significance to the number. Twenty-four is OK since 2[sup]2[/sup] = 4. Twenty-three is OK since they are consecutive numbers. TWENTY SEVEN IS NOT ACCEPTABLE THOUGH!!! It will probably be 26 (the number of cards in half a deck of playing cards) or occasionally 28 (2[sup]3[/sup] = 8) but I’d be more likely just to bump it up to 30 (round and divisible by 10).
More to add for myself:
If there’s any chance of a waiting area for a restaurant to get full I will refuse to sit. I would rather just stand the whole time than sit and have to get up if someone else needs my seat.
I can’t stand incorrect clocks. Drives me absolutely bat shit insane.
In my local mall there are stripes of different colored tiles every 30 or so feet. I have to step on the rows of tiles bordering the “normal” colored tiles…
The toes of my shoes would have to hit the smiley faced rows of tiles and miss the frowns.
I can’t stand hearing or seeing people spit. I have to try pretty hard not to retch. I’m fine with pukey noises though.
And I won’t take the top item off a stack. Plates, newspapers, forms, books, whatever. I want the second one down, at least.
I absolutely cannot wear navy blue (or, for that matter, any blue with cool, periwinklish undertones). This is true for many colors, especially bright ones, but is truest for navy blue. I feel uneasy and restless and have a strong urge to change clothes.
Although I’m usually a big fan of standard usage, I punctuate the ends of my sentences in the British style. (Like this: Sans Seraph explained, “I don’t think a holdover from mechanical typesetting deserves to persist in American English”.) The punctuation has to nest like the punctuation in programming languages. I get away with it, too, but that is probably because most of my professors are scientists.
Also, I cut the tags off of everything. If my friends have items with tags, I will offer to remove them.
But 27 is 3[sup]3[/sup]!
I get antsy about messy towels also. And I cannot abide towel rings.
I do the pause before or after a sentence thing, too – DVDs, PVR, wherever. There is a kind of logic to it though: It’s easier to pick up where you left off when you get the whole sentence for context instead of picking it up in mid-word when you don’t have the rest of the sentence to give to the cue as to what was going on right away. I don’t really think that’s much of a hangup though.
Me, I can’t eat foods in any other state than the one I was introduced to it in. I cannot eat cold pizza, for example, because pizza is meant to be hot. Nor can I heat up anything originally intended to be eaten cold. I can’t bear the idea of eating gazpacho soup because – well, it’s soup. Soup is supposed to be hot. Some things, like turkey or most other kinds of meat, I can eat hot or cold because they are just as good in a full meal as in a sandwich. But I can’t drink iced coffee for example, because it just strikes me as wrong. It’s coffee, so it’s supposed to be hot, ergo this cold coffee beverage is just weird and I can’t drink it. I can’t eat cold cooked vegetables. Bottom line is, if I am introduced to a particular food, I will have to eat it the way it was prepared the first time. Ingredients, configuration, sides, or other factors may vary, and I love variety that way, but it must be served in the same state I originally had it in.
I also hate it when foods that aren’t supposed to go together mix on the plate. Gravy can go on the potatoes and meat as long as it stays the hell away from the beans, corn, other vegetables/sides that aren’t meant to have gravy. This is kinda related to the above in that “having something the way it’s meant to be served” kind of way. Ideally, no two unrelated foods should even touch, but that’s inevitable and I’m okay with that as long as I can keep the flavours separate.
Similarly, I can’t drink while I have a mouthful of food. I’ve seen people who, while still masticating their last mouthful, take a big ol’ swig of something and swallow it all at once. That just squicks me the hell out. This, too, is related, because drinks aren’t supposed to mingle with food until one of the two is safely tucked away in my belly. It may all go down the same hatch, as has been so eloquently explained to me in the past, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it has to do so in groups. (Before you ask, yes, I can mix some foods in my mouth – I dip my steak in the mashed potatoes and maybe add a bit of corn to the mix before shoveling it in my mouth. It just has to be separate until that event.)
I can’t drink the milk that’s left over in my cereal bowl, if there is any. Because it tastes like the cereal, yet contains no cereal. It’s cereal-flavoured milk, and that’s just weird to me.
I hate eating messy foods. If my hands get messy in the process of eating I have to lick/wipe them clean between bites. Wings are a chore to eat if they’re baked with the sauce, so I usually get the sauce on the side.
Whenever my twin sister or mother is eating near me and either one of them suddenly coughs, I immediately have a small fight-or-flight reaction that lasts for 3 seconds until I’ve established that they are okay. Why? Because I think they are choking.
This reflex has been in effect for about 18 years now and it has shown no signs of going away. Stems from that one time me and monstro were eating rottiserie chicken at age 12 and the fool started choking on the skin. And I went into a panic.
Wooden ice cream paddles give me a total freak out. I cannot stand to use them. If someone else is using one, I have to stop what I am doing and get them a real spoon.
I cannot bite into a muffin or a bagel. I pull little pieces off and put them into my mouth.
This is incredibly encouraging. This proves no matter how quirky(OCD) you may be, there’s someone out there for everybody.
Golly, I feel weird not having as many–maybe I’m missing out on something. The only ones I can think of are
I prefer the blue ink over black, only coz then you know it’s the original. anyone can make a copy and it comes out black!
At the gym, the weights have to be put on the bar with the numbers on the inside.
…I think I’m pretty cool on everything else. All foods can touch(I like integration), the toilet paper can be over or under, and I like my milk chunky, preferably on a spoon.
I can’t even look at those corrugated cardboard cupholders without shuddering.
shudder
My coworkers a few jobs ago covered my cube in them just to torture me. 
Thanks all, I feel a lot better about myself now. I’m nearly quirk-free, I think.
My only maybe that I have a very hard time turning off the radio in the middle of a song, it makes me think that I *killed *it or something. CD’s are better, I back them up to the beginning of the song before I turn the key off so the song can play from the beginning when I turn the car back on. I guess it gets a chance to live again or something.
I *notice *multiples and powers of the basic integers, can’t get through a math-intensive degree and not have a affinity for these numbers but my stereo volume can be at 13 as easily as 16 (one’s a prime and the other a square so maybe their both special).
That’s about it, I think.
Me too. On our other TV, the onscreen volume display is a slider, not a number. On that one, the vertical bar indicator of the volume level has to line up exactly with the edge of one of the letters in “Volume”, displayed above the slider. Ideally, the ‘l’.
What the fuck?
A few years ago I had a roommate who had a few quirks, one of which he passed on to me: I can no longer leave keys directly on a table. He claimed it meant bad luck or something, but for me it doesn’t even have a meaning. There has to be something between the keys and the table surface, even if it is just a piece of paper.
Are you insane? Twenty-three is PRIME!
Another thing I thought of: If I buy an individual size bag of chips, I have to open it up completely (along one side, or the seam), spread it out like a little picnic blanket with all the chips in a pile in the middle. I then proceed to pick out and eat all the broken ones first, saving the pristine unbroken chips for last.
I do something similar with peanuts. If I have a jar of peanuts, I have to dump out a handful or so into the lid of the jar, like a little plate. I then pick through and eat all of the ones that are broken in half first, saving the whole peanuts for last.
Also, all the screws in the light switch plates in my house must be aligned vertically (i.e. the screwdriver slot in the screw must be perpendicular to the floor).
I also find this somewhat disturbing.
Yeah, I grew up in the cash days, and always did that. But I’ve been using a credit card to buy gas for years and years, and I STILL have to top off until the amount is a multiple of 5. Actually, leaving the last digit at 5 kinda bugs me, I’m not really satisfied unless it’s a zero. Fortunately ( :dubious: ) the higher gas prices make that easier to accomplish.
The writers on Monk need to see this thread. It could keep them supplied with side plots for years . . .
OK, my quirks (get ready, it’s a list):
My fingernails must always be clean and short. If I can rub the side of my finger near the tip and feel a nail, I’m trimming it. They must always be rounded at the tips.
I already mentioned drinking milk, ice cold only, only from a glass.
My nose hairs must always been trimmed so that they’re nearly gone.
My ears must always be clean – no wax anywhere.
I can’t have any diagnostic lights illuminated on my dash board.
My computers must be fast. I can’t deal with slowness of any kind. It takes me days sometimes weeks to tweak a computer so it runs perfectly. No error messages can be anywhere.
My business communication always contains perfect grammar, punctuation, and spelling. If I sent something out that wasn’t perfect in any of these categories, I’d bug me for a week. Other people’s typos irriate the hell out of me.
In my bed, the top sheet was always be tucked in. I hate having the top sheet free and loose at the bottom.
I can’t watch a movie even if it is only 5 minutes into it. I’ll change the channel and watch something else, even if it’s a movie I really want to see.
I must always prepare my food before eating it. To clarify, if I go to a restaurant and get a plate of food containing meat, a starch and a vegetable, I cut the meat, stir both the starch and the veggie before I take my first bite.
I cannot drink warm beer, ever. It must be ice cold.
I don’t like lights on. I like the house to be completely dark at night.
I have an aversion to any food that has the words “diet”, “lite”, “light”, or “fat free” on the labels. I just cannot eat them.
I can’t watch professional sports if the field of play isn’t manicured (brown grass).
I hate when there are graphics on TV broadcast that interfere with what I’m watching; in fact nothing can prevent me from seeing 100% of the screen.
I’m sure there are more, but that’s all I can think of that the moment.
If I take a cup/drinking glass out of a cupboard/drainboard, I have to blow in it before filling it.
Started when I was young, can’t remember if there was ever dust or something in a cup that started this off.
They laugh at me when it’s my own stuff, and some have been insulted when I did it to their glasses.
But sometimes I can’t stop myself in time.
