My Six Quirks

Hey. So I got tagged by Shasta. I'll go ahead and fill this out, even though I'm pretty sure that I have a lot more than just six quirks.

1. I don't mix my foods. I can't even let the different foods on my plate touch each other (with a few rare exceptions like turkey and mashed potatoes). I didn't even eat different foods at the same time for a long time. I only ate one food at a time in a specific order to ensure that I neither started nor ended my meal with vegetables until I was married. Somehow marriage has loosened me up a little. When I was a kid, my little sister Lisa used to pile all of her meat, potatoes, and veggies into one big heap and then pour gravy over it all at Sunday dinner and it would make me nauseous, but I've had this bizarre compulsion since I was like 2.

2. I eat cereal for breakfast every morning. Most adults I know skip breakfast, but it's the only meal of the day I can't skip. I have frosted mini wheats with soy milk probably like 340 days a year. Weird, huh? The only exceptions are when I'm on vacation, when I forget to go shopping and run out of soy milk or mini wheats, or when I eat late at night and wake up with a high blood sugar stomach ache. I've heard stories that my great grandfather Partridge used to eat cracked wheat cereal with honey for breakfast every morning and attributed his long life (97 years) to the fact that he ate his daily dose of fiber. Kind of makes you think, huh?

3. I can't sleep at night unless it's totally absolutely quiet and dark. This is getting a little bit better as I get older, but it's still pretty bad. When I was in college I averaged like 4 hours of sleep a night because by the time I got to bed, someone else was getting up. Nowdays, Luis snores... badly, so that means most nights I sleep with a pillow over my head. I also have to turn my alarm clock face down because it's too bright for me to sleep. Hence, I am always the last one to go to sleep at night, and the first one up in the morning because the sun wakes me. I am usually awake by 7 or 8 on weekends, even when I don't have Andrei or an alarm clock to wake me.

4. I make up silly songs about pretty much everything. It's kind of ridiculous but I sing to my dogs, to Andrei, to Luis, with the radio, in the shower, to the dishes... pretty much everywhere. It's something I've done my entire life. Sometimes they have a tune or rhyme. Sometimes it's just string of consciousness singing. When I'm not singing, I have to be listening to music, unless I'm at work or watching t.v. When I'm in the store I always listen to the background music and will often randomly recite the lyrics of the songs that are playing to people, catching them off-guard because who in their right mind pays attention to background music?

5. I only own shirts in the following colors: rose Pink, turquoise, green, brown and red. All of my other tops are neutrals. I just realized this the other day looking in my closet. I only own 1 orange shirt (because it says Wong's Chinese Palace- hello! I look hideous in it, but who cares!?), 1 yellow shirt, and 1 purple shirt (That has a picture of an awesome Tiger on it) outside that color spectrum, and I rarely wear them.I don't wear stripes and rarely wear patterns. My closet kind of looks like one big monochromatic neutral blob. The one major exception is my Chicago Bears Jersey which I still wear even though it's like 20 years old. It has holes in the sleeves from when i was in college and tried to dry it in the microwave for a date I was going on one night. Yes. That's right. I microwaved a shirt to dry it. I bet you wish you'd thought of that first!

6. I'm afraid to talk on the telephone. I screen all my calls for this purpose, so if you call me and I don't answer, it's my irrational phobia at work. I really only have like 3 people that I can talk to without major anxiety: My mom, Emily, and Luis. I call those 3 regularly. I can't even call and order a pizza, though, without rehearsing it. I couldn't call the movie theatre to check show times without having a panic attack until I was like 17 years old. Often I write down what I'm going to say on the phone because I get too stressed out. It's really annoying, but it's been like this since I was a kid. My parents were always concerned because I was the only one of their teenagers who didn't run up the phone bill. I couldn't function as an adult without texting.

Ok. Now I tag Emily, Sara, and Melissa.