Sep 16 2008
More Quirksome Facts You Could Do Without
Helene from I’m Living Proof That God Has a Sense of Humor challenged me today to expose six of my less than zany quirks online. Although I already gave you a glimpse last month, I figured I can probably scrounge up six more in the hopes you all will find me more interesting. In my real life, I’m a boring plain Jane mama. I’m vanilla ice-cream. I’m un-buttered toast. But for the purposes of this blog post I’ll try to make myself exciting, maybe mint-chocolate chip, maybe some garlicky focaccia.
Am I beyond making sense right now?
Doesn’t matter. That’s what three hours with an uncompromising and screeching toddler does to me.
On to the quirks.
1. Probably not as exciting as I’d intended is my inability to keep my tongue in my mouth during moments of duress and extreme concentration. I swear the thing has a mind of its own, it flicks back and forth, or just hangs out of the corner of my mouth like something foreign. This quirk stopped being cute when I was four and learning how to work the safety scissors. Now it just makes me look like one of those little Mexican hairless dogs whose tongues are too big for their mouths.
2. My mind is always working, so I have this tendency at times to ask three to six questions in rapid succession fully expecting an answer to each one of them. Usually my husband is on the receiving end of this and never knows how to respond, except to give me this perplexed look. Really, though, by now he should have learned how to keep up.
3. I have this strange fascination with pan drippings. I’m like a cat. After dinner, before I rinse off the dishes, I always go to the pan and take a few little tastes of the carmelized dried up remnants. It’s like concentrated flavor and I can’t help myself.
4. I have to sleep with covers. Even when we were without power in ‘95 after Katrina blew through and it was like 97 degrees in the house, I still had to pull a thin sheet over myself to feel secure enough to fall asleep. I hate being exposed like that for some reason, maybe some part of my psyche still expects the boogey man to reach up from under the bed and snatch at my bare feet, who knows? Obviously covers are like armor for boogey men.
5. Since I can remember, I’ve always ascribed genders to both colors and numbers. I’m not sure if everyone does this. I know my daughter does, but hers never match up with mine. I mean, Red is so obviously a girl and Purple is clearly a boy.
6. I once won $200 in an online poetry contest. I also presented the poem at a local reading and it only took me three vodka cranberries to build up the courage to take the stage. The emcee introduced me as “a woman, a poet, a mother, and a lover” which did nothing to soothe my strained nerves. Since then for some reason I haven’t written a single poem. It’s been five years.
I’m passing the torch to Simply AnonyMOM and Parenting Pink and Mother Fonker.
I also want to thank Elizabeth from Parenting Pink for giving me my second:
Which I’ll pass on to Casey over at Half As Good As You for being gritty and fab and keeping me chuckling.
So there.
