i bet i'm weirder than you

as seen on ruthie's blog...

"The first player of this game starts with the topic five weird habits of yourelf and people who get tagged need to write an entry about their five weird habits as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose the next five people to be tagged and link to their web journals."

i'm not into tagging people, but i have tons of weird habits/things, so here goes the fun:

(1) i have a fear of mirrors after dark. i never used to, but at a halloween party in 2004, i heard stories that freaked me out about mirrors. unfortunately, in my dining room here in NJ, one whole wall is a giant mirror and it's the first thing you see when you come to the house. so if i come home to an empty house at night and my roommate leigh (who thinks about such things) hasn't been home to leave the dining room light on for me, there's a whole routine of what to turn on in what order before dashing across the dining room to turn the dining room light on without looking at the wall sized mirror. my friends laugh at me for it.

(2) i am extremely anal retentive about how my board games get put back in the box. so if you play one of my board games with me, there's probably equally much of a game to put it away again. monopoly and rummikub are the two that annoy people the most. when i stack rummikub tiles to put them back in the box, i make whoever is playing with me put the tiles face up, the same direction in stacks of 5, and if i can, i try to make a pattern in the box with the colors of the tiles that are on the tops of the stacks. with monopoly, house rules that my brother and i play at the end if one person or the other isn't bankrupt is that you go around the board in order and sell houses and properties back to the bank and then the person with the most cash, once everything is redeemed is the winner... selling the properties to the bank in order means the banker has all the property deeds in order for the next game too.

(3) i have 14 pillows on my bed. each of them has a very particular spot on the bed during the day, so when i get up, i throw the pillows on the floor in a certain order, make my bed, and then put them back on the bed in another certain order (the reverse of how i throw them on the floor). similarly, i have 5 calendars in my room -- a dry erase board monthly calendar that i mark off an x on each day, 3 "quote a day calendars" that aren't for any particular year on my bookcase, and a weekly planner calendar on my desk... after the making the bed routine, there's a routine to marking each calendar to the next day too that i can't bring myself to do out of order.

(4) whenever i open a box of candy/food/whatever that has multiple flavors, even if it's a giant size bag/box, i dump the whole thing out and sort it by colors, and then arrange it into groups with the same number of each color.... and *then* i eat it in that order...

e.g., say i got a bag of skittles with 5 purple, 5 red, 7 green, 8 orange, and 8 yellow, then i would put 5 of each back in the bag for later.... i would put 2 green, 2 orange, and 2 yellow somewhere near the bag in a group, then put the remaining orange and the remaining yellow together elsewhere. i have to eat the 1 orange 1 yellow first... the 2 green/2 orange/2 yellow next, and eat the 5 of each kind last

(5) when i'm driving long distance in the car by myself and cross state lines, i actually audibly say hello and goodbye to whatever states i'm crossing into and out of and tell them when i'll see them again.

and you thought *you* were weird... i think i definitely take the cake... not many people, short of in asylums, can outweird mathematicians. :-P

the end.