One Little, Two Little...Ten Little Quirks of Mandrake!

Keeping track, are we? Well, here are ten odd little things most people do not realize about me.

10. I refrain from calling anyone by name as much as possible. The only real exceptions are my parents and sister (who I usually call Emblem), and my boss, whose name I need to call to get his attention.

9. I will sometimes set my alarm for one, two, or even three a.m., get up, take a warm shower, and go back to sleep.

8. As a child and teenager, I would spend hours counting the strokes it took to make letters and numbers. My mother also does this. I liked names that ended with even strokes, especially fours and zeroes, and stared at digital clocks to figure out how to maximize the number of tick marks without ending up with an odd-numbered sum.

I would also count letter frequencies when I was bored, for fun, or to distract myself from unpleasant situations. Another alternative to this was to make lists with the alphabet - name vegetables and fruits or birds from A to Z.

7. If I take any sort of nap, for any length of time, I immediately wake up nauseous and remain so for the rest of the day, until I go back to sleep at night.

6. I like doing crunches. I like stretching for long periods of time even better. I, ahem, also liked The Old Man and the Sea. Oh, the masochism!

5. I am a bit obsessive about my hands always smelling good. I also cannot stand when they are overly warm.

4. I have very good hearing, so much so that I would get extremely frustrated as a child when loud, persistent noises were bombarding me. Supposedly I had fluid in my ears a lot, and that helped cause my problem. But, I now realize I also hear sounds that are farther than 15 feet away from the precisely opposite direction that they come from.

3. I only sleep with socks on when I am sleeping outdoors. I often sleep in a skirt and sleeveless top, even in winter. I always sleep in full underclothes.

2. I can recite phone numbers I have not dialed in 5 years, recall names of people or characters I have not thought of in years, and have at least seventy passwords in my head. But if you tell me where you went to school, what you studied, or where you work, I will forget it within a day - maybe even less.

1. I still do #8 unconsciously. The letter frequencies are useful for figuring out cyphers, and the other word games are a sort of restless habit.

Momentary Soundtrack: The theme song to Have Gun, Will Travel, which we gave to my dad on DVD for his birthday.
Quote Trapped in My Head: "He's a crotch killa...Whoo!"
What I Learned Today: Lynn from Carnival of Song commented on my blog. You should have heard the ecstatic mess that was me when I found out!