Confession #31

For an English nerd, I have read surprisingly little.

I'm trying to change that, slowly but surely. Tomorrow I plan on diving into a treasury of Sherlock Holmes.

Confession #30

I'm not good at hugs.

My first instinct is never reciprocate embrace but instead:

I don't know why. It isn't because Mommy and Daddy didn't love me enough or anything, because my parents hugged me plenty as a kid and my mom still does. My dad prefers sneaking up behind me and goosing me in the ribs while hollering something incoherent to startle me further. Actually, it may be his fault after all.

Confession #29

I will do almost anything to keep from running out of shampoo before conditioner or vice versa.

It's easy enough to use equal amounts of both, sure, but only when you aren't currently sharing the shampoo and conditioner with your twelve-year-old sister, who apparently has no concern for such things. And so, I have come to realize just how highly this annoyance ranks on my list of pet peeves. (The answer is very highly.)

Confession #28

I compulsively count things.

It started out with trains. Any time I see a train, I have to count the cars. Always. And if I lose track because it's moving too fast, or if someone says something and distracts me, I get really frustrated—more frustrated than I ought to considering it's just a train and it doesn't matter how many cars it has. I think I was about eleven when the counting turned from just-for-fun into a must-count-now sort of thing. For years that was the only thing I counted, but in the last several months, I've started unconsciously counting more and more things.

I don't count anything and everything; usually I count non-static things or things that are moving/appear to be moving from my vantage point. In other words, if you spill toothpicks on the floor, I'm not going to pull a Rain Man, but if you send me up a staircase, I will count the steps. Similarly, I often count floor tiles as I walk by. (This is especially true of patterned floor tiles, in which case I count the offset colors.) Sometimes I count the stripes painted on roads. (I once made it all the way past sixty before I realized what I was doing.) If you've seen the movie Stranger Than Fiction, you may recall that in the very beginning, when Harold's character is being introduced, there is a clip of Harold brushing his teeth with the narrator saying, "Harold counted brush strokes." Michelle counts brush strokes too. In fact, that was first thing I noticed myself counting months ago.

It usually doesn't bother me to stop counting once I realize I've started (train cars being the exception), but it worries me a little that the counting has gotten worse lately. I find myself counting more things, more often. Not too long ago, as I was lying in bed trying to sleep, I suddenly became aware that I was counting each breath I took. That's something that had never happened before. The same goes for counting heartbeats when I'm still enough to take notice of my pulse. I've also begun counting the ticks of any clock loud enough to hear, and even the beats in music when I'm not singing along. (Interestingly, the band nerd/dancer in me always takes over in those instances, making it 1-2-3-4, 2-2-3-4, 3-2-3-4 etc or 1-2-3, 2-2-3, 3-2-3 etc, etc depending on the time signature of the song.) I'm wondering if it has anything to do with stress. Though the past six years have been stressful, the last year has been particularly so. Plus, there is a history of OCD in my family, so there's that. Counting, from what I've read, is a fairly common symptom of OCD. However, I know that people with OCD tend to have a very difficult time fighting the symptoms, and like I said previously, it's usually pretty easy for me to stop counting. Although sometimes after I make myself stop, I just end up unconsciously restarting... Hmm...

At this point, it isn't a major problem and does not interfere with the quality of my life, so I'm trying to stress out about it. I think stressing might only serve to make it worse.

Confession #27

I find it amusing when people assume that, because I behave, speak, and dress conservatively, I must also be completely naive to the ways of the world.*

Puhleeze.

I remember one time when I was... oh, fourteen or so, I went into my brother's bedroom for something and got distracted by his TV. He was watching one of those "mature" cartoons which always fail to entertain me but which everyone else seems to find hilarious. Seeing my frown, my brother—being two years older and "wiser"—decided that the reason I wasn't laughing must be because I simply didn't understand the show. So he proceeded to narrate the entire show, explaining every single thing that happened. I guess I had nothing better to do, because I humored him and listened to his interpretation of each joke, right up until one of the characters started snickering about a dog named Boner. At that point, my brother said something along the lines of, "Yeahh... sometimes it doesn't really make sense why the characters are laughing, but they're dumb so you just have to go along with it." And he thought I was the one that needed explanations.

*I'm not claiming to know the ins and outs of everything of all time, but gimme some credit, will ya?