a meme: six weird things about me

Fr. C. would like to contribute to this.
He's sure he can think of more than six.
I constantly assure him - I am quite normal.

I think I first saw this meme on Anglicamp.

1. I talk to myself...but only when someone else is in the vicinity. I've decided that's an expression of joy in 'not being alone inside myself'. Either that, or it's just plain weird.

2. I'm hopelessly affected by how things look and feel. I'm surprised I touch a computer at all, and often print out a doc at work so that I can easily read/edit it in that form first. And, I don't care how GREAT a book is -- if the cover design doesn't appeal to me and the paper doesn't feel velvety in my hands any the typeset isn't enticingly 'invisible' to my discomfort meter...I'll find it hard to read it. The latest book that IS great: Suite Francais, which I picked up in an airport bookstore before flying to visit Warsaw Indiana and thought surely nothing good can come from an airport bookstore and was delightfully proved wrong even before I saw the full page ad in the New York Times Sunday book section I picked up off a seat in a concourse before boarding to come home. Whew.

3. I perseverate. Mostly on things 'ultimate'. When I find my favorite track on a CD, I listen to nothing else but that. I have ONE thing I wear that feels 'ultimately me' (I'm sure everyone knows what that is.). If I were to find something else a smidgen better, I might not wear the current fave at all...it having slipped to second place, which is the same as oblivion.

4. I look at people's mouths while talking with (i.e., listening to...) them. It's always been that way with me, so I haven't wondered about it much...except to sometimes ponder if it's what other people do. But add that to...not being able to enjoy a choral concert without the text in front of me...not being able to make out lyrics on CD's without the liner notes... Lately, I've come to a possibly accurate understanding of this, which is that - despite not having a hearing loss - there may be something in my brain wiring that needs a connection with the visual to process the data. Scary. But not so much, at my 'advanced' age.

5. Occasionally, well, rather rarely, writing comes frighteningly easy. When I go back and read it, I'm amazed at serendipity and am not sure where images and latent artistic connections came from and it seems beyond me -- like it has a life of its own. Then, in the case of...say...a blog entry...I live in the internal shadow of that and can't put a single sentence together coherently for a while and feel blocked and depressed and...oh, Fr. C. now declares, You need therapy. *teasing* (I tried to create this as a new 'html tag", but it wouldn't let me. Asterisks, it is.)

6. I eat parsley. Lots of it, if I remember to do so. People find that weird. But actually it isn't. It is a great female hormone balancer. That, and a few other things which I won't blog about now.

6.5. I can't stop editing my blogs.