“Don’t Look at the Fat-Ass Losers and Freaks, Look at ME!”

It seems KDiddy tagged me for a meme (wow, could I say “me” a bit more? ME! MEMEMEMEMEMMEEEEE!) that requires me to list six of my “quirks.” An interesting word, “quirk.” For it is widely known that only cute people have quirks, the rest of us are just annoying.

Oh my God, shut up Amelie.

However, just for today, let us all pretend that the things I am about to share with you are cute and endearing, instead of inconvenient and maddening and the primary reason Brad will be canonized for sainthood in the year 2009.

Here we go.

1. I absolutely cannot stand to walk around in bare feet. Yes, with the exception of being at the pool or the beach, my freak ass needs shoes/slippers/flip-flops on at all times (socks are enough sometimes, but not all the time) – EVEN IN MY OWN HOUSE. It’s definitely gotten worse as I’ve gotten older, but even when I was young I remember trying to force myself to be one of those “I love being in my bare feet!” people, but it just wasn’t happening. The main reason for this is that I cannot STAND to step on anything whilst barefoot: crumbs (oh holy shit) and hair (GROSS) being the main culprits. This was a huge issue for me throughout college, when I had to be barefoot during my touchy-feely movement classes in a dance studio that was swept maybe once a week. It was a constant cringe-fest, the very worst incident being the time I stepped on a (HORRORS!) fingernail. Maybe it was a toenail, I don’t know. I was too busy trying to catch my skin after it crawled clear off my body and ran into traffic to make a proper identification.
2. I hate throwing up, and will do anything to avoid it, including selling my first-born (and possibly yours) to the gypsies. Look, I know that no one likes throwing up. But me? I HATE IT. Even if I know it will make me feel better. In fact (and I hesitate to even share this, because I feel like I’m jinxing myself), I have not thrown up since 1984. When I was seven years old. And in the first grade. That’s 24 FUCKING YEARS AGO, OH MY LORD. I have even had the stomach flu and managed not to throw up (NOT EASY; I DO NOT RECOMMEND IT), and I know it can’t possibly be good for me, but at this point it’s just a habit. Also, I’m not really good around other people when they barf. Brad knows, for instance, that if he gets his arm cut off in a freak accident, I will be right there with my needle & thread, but if he throws up? Yeah, I’ll be at the mall. Good luck with that. [LET ME JUST GO AHEAD AND SAY WHAT ALL OF YOU ARE THINKING: This crazy whore hates throwing up, so she went and got herself pregnant with a child. You know, children: those little people who puke ALL THE TIME. Yeah, I know. I’m hoping love will blind me and I will be cured, immersion-therapy style. Can’t wait.]
3. I can be weird about food. This is an effect of the puke-fear, and has gotten much better since I’ve aged, but when I was in 3rd grade, I found this book in the library entitled Germs Make You Sick! I’m not sure if it was curiosity or the bright, cartoonish illustrations that made me choose this book over the stacks of tomes on kittens and ponies and BFFs, but I took it home, read it, and became a hypochondriac for a little while. Thanks, literacy! Anyhoo, this book also taught me that, in addition to germs, bad food can make you sick (Jesus, who writes a book like this for kids? Thank goodness I avoided the sequel: Diseases Take Away Your Grandma!). Well, I had no idea about the concept of food poisoning up to this point, so I kind of…took things to the extreme. My mother spent a good chunk of my elementary school years just getting me to EAT YOUR GODDAMN DINNER ALREADY, THOSE BLACK SPECKS ARE JUST PEPPER, NOT A DEADLY, BRAIN-EATING MOLD. Like I said, I’ve chilled out about this quite a bit, but I’m still very careful about where I order meals that contain meat. And sushi? I pretty much only eat sushi at establishments where the Virgin Mary is preparing my sashimi on a bed of freshly minced cherubim.
4. I get really touchy about the Elephant Man. Bear with me here. At some point in high school, I saw that movie about the Elephant Man on a cable movie channel, and it broke my heart into about 8 zillion tiny pieces. I checked out a few books at the library about John Merrick and his life (this was before the internet, kids! Where’s my nitroglycerin?), and got even more depressed when I learned all the immensely sad details of his short life. I guess it was because I came across this story during my emotional teen years, when I was particularly struck by all the DRAMA and ROMANCE and UNFAIRNESS of it all, but I took his story very, very personally. I didn’t really even tell anyone about how attached I was to the whole thing, but at one point I was on a road trip with the cast of an educational show about AIDS that used to travel from school to school (fuckin’ A, could this story get weirder?), and somehow, someone made a joke about the Elephant Man. And friends, I lost it. LOST IT. Full-on defensive, HOW-DARE-YOU mode. So, yeah, after that? It was a big joke that YOU DO NOT kid around about the Elephant Man in my presence. I’m not so sensitive about it anymore, but shit, now that I’ve recounted this whole story and looked him up on Wikipedia, I’m getting emotional all over again. HE IS NOT AN ANIMAL!!
5. I have to touch the outside of the airplane before I board. Now, this isn’t something I really have to do, but more like something I like to do. In other words, you will not see me on the 5 o’clock news being tased by the TSA because I flipped out over not being able to touch the exterior of the plane before I boarded. It’s more of a little tradition than anything else, but it’s something I do every time I fly. Right when I make the step from the jetway to the plane, I put my hand on the outside of the plane, just to the right of the door. I guess it’s a little reminder to myself of how sturdy the plane is (in my mind, it’s made of balsa wood and rubber cement), and also a little Don’t-Let-Me-Down,-Son pat I give to an inanimate object because yes, I think we have already established that I am kind of insane.
6. I suck at talking on the phone. Email? I love it. Face-to-face? Even better. Phone call? Uh…can’t you just email me? There’s just something so…anonymously high-pressure and immediate about telephone conversations that unnerves me to no end. I can’t see the other person’s face, I feel the constant need to fill any quiet pauses, and sometimes it’s just really fucking hard to end the conversation. This applies mostly to phone calls with people I don’t know, because I pretty much start out the entire conversation in a pre-flustered state, but it can be just as awkward with friends or family. And it’s made EVEN WORSE by cell phones and those FUCKING TIME DELAYS that cause the two people in the conversation to inadvertently start speaking at the exact same fucking time. HATE. What’s strange is that, until college, my main mode of communication with my friends and family and anyone who wasn’t standing directly in front of me was the telephone – and I talked on the phone A LOT. I can remember getting my own phone in my room when I was in 7th grade and talking to my best friend for HOURS. Of course, I can only imagine how stimulating those conversations were. Yikes.

“I wonder what it’s like to Do It!”

Next, I must pass the torch of this meme to…I think six people? Uh, I am not sure I know six of you who read this blog and HAVE a blog (and I don’t know if it’s proper etiquette to tag a lurker. Is it? Or will she hate me?). Well, let’s just go for it and see what happens, shall we? In the interest of getting to know some of you better, I tag:

1. Laura
2. Hills
3. Julia
4. Carrie
5. Sara
6. Shelli

Get to work, ladies! Tell me all the things that make you freakishly annoying quirky! Because really, there’s nothing cuter than a telephone-phobic, fully-shod, expiration-date-checking, airplane-touching, Elephant-Man loving vomit-holder-backer, is there?!

“Whatever, freak.”