10 weird things about me

Jane tagged me, so here goes:

1. I have mafia anxieties. The most common one is that I'm in a traffic accident with someone who's related to a mafia don, and the don decides to have me whacked because of it. I didn't see The Godfather for years because I thought it would only increase the anxiety; I can't even imagine watching The Sopranos, and I usually turn off any episode of Law & Order that winds up being about organized crime.

2. My other chronic anxiety involves being sent to jail for a crime I didn't commit. I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't be able to survive in prison, but I have a Plan: The thing I'll do, see, is try to get the prison library work gig, and then I'll volunteer to help fellow inmates obtain their GEDs, and enough of them will be grateful to me that they'll protect me from the prisoners who want to beat me to death. And maybe that will keep me alive until Sfrajett can get me out of jail. Needless to say, I don't watch movies and TV shows that take place in prison either.

3. Last anxiety item, I promise: When I was in junior high and high school, I used to wake up in the middle of the night and think that I was on the soccer field rather than in my bed (this was back in the days when I played soccer in our local kids' league). And I'd be so tired that I couldn't really play soccer, but of course you can't lie down right on the field, so I'd stand or walk around in my room for a long time, trying to fake being an alert rather than sleepy soccer player. Sometimes my mom would hear me walking around and would come into my room, tell me that the soccer game was over, and reassure me that it was okay to go to sleep now. A later version of this same sleep thing happened in college, when I'd think I was in the studio doing my radio show; at least I got to sit rather than stand for that one. Somehow the fact that I was just standing/sitting there in my room and was not actually playing soccer or playing records was not an issue in these middle-of-the-night episodes; the important thing was just not to lie down. I haven't had this problem in years and years, but I'm not sure what changed.

4. When I eat M&Ms, I have to eat an even number and put the same number on each side of my mouth at once. I don't really care what color they are, though.

5. When I was in 4th grade, I failed history class because I didn't turn in our major assignment. We were supposed to write out by hand all of the timeline/charts in our World History textbook, and I just couldn't do it. Leaving aside the really awful pedagogy of having students simply copy things word for word out of their textbooks, the reason I didn't do the assignment was that I couldn't get all of the columns in my chart exactly even. I spent hours and hours trying to construct the perfect blank chart to fill in, and when I couldn't do it I simply quit. I'd love to get back into my child's head and figure out why I didn't ask my parents for help. (I was thinking about this episode recently because of Bitch, Ph.D.'s story about PK's perfectionism in assignments.) Because of my F in the class, I lost my role in our class play, and that was the end of my theatrical career. Now that I think about it, this might be not so much a "weird" thing about me as a kind of sad and pathetic thing.

6. My two childhood heroes were George Washington Carver and J. Edgar Hoover. Bizarre, I know. It's because I had inherited from my dad this wonderful series of child-oriented biographies of famous Americans, and these were my two favorites in the series. I can still remember one of the lines about the FBI organization: "Hoover looked for men who could handle a teacup as well as a gun." I totally wanted to be an FBI agent when I grew up, as did my dad, who was influenced by exactly the same book.

7. The other thing I wanted to be when I grew up was a telephone operator, the kind who had a huge switchboard in front of her and moved plugs around and wore a headset and talked with the folks on either end of the line. Totally a Bells Are Ringing sort of thing, except that of course this technology was already obsolete by my childhood. And I must have known this, since I talked on telephones just like any normal kid, but somehow I didn't put the pieces together to realize that my golden era of telephone operating had already passed.

8. In my mid-20s, I was making a cross-country drive from the Midwest to the West Coast, and I intended to spend the night just outside of Las Vegas, in a town that has very cheap hotels because of course they want you to come there and gamble away all of your money. But then I got to the town (which is really just a wide spot in the road with casinos on either side; it's the last spot to gamble before the California border), I stopped to eat dinner at the Burger King inside of the hotel before I checked in. And from my fast food vantage point, I could see into the casino. And I was so horrified by what I saw there -- the despair, the zoned-out zombiness, the children wandering unattended, the money being drained away from miserable people -- that I simply couldn't spend another minute there and certainly intended to give this establishment no more of my money. So instead I got back into my car and drove through the night to southern California. This involved my driving over the mountains while very, very sleepy, thus endangering lives and being in every way less "pure" than if I had just stayed in the stupid casino hotel. This is typical of my ongoing desire and ongoing failure to lead a pure life.

9. As #8 perhaps makes clear, I am overly influenced by the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century  novels that I inhaled as a child. My Christianity and ethics are straight out of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Little Women. This is perhaps not a good thing.

10. Reminiscent of #7 above: When I was in 6th grade, my greatest ambition for my adult years was to be a Gibson Girl. Again, I somehow operated with no historical consciousness at all. Imagine my disappointment on discovering that a "shirtwaist" -- a mysterious item for which I desperately longed! -- was only a blouse. I pretty much blame the Betsy-Tacy series for this obsession. It was a great victory for me to include a Gibson picture in my dissertation -- the closest I could get to achieving that childhood ambition. I'm still pretty much a late 19th-/early 20th-century Progressive at heart.

   
It's always hard to know if one's weirdnesses are charming and quirky or merely deranged. 

Comments

[revdrmom]

What is it with the m&m weirdness? You are the fourth or fifth person I've read who has an m&m ritual of some sort.

And I always wanted Gibson girl hair.

J. Edgar Hoover???? Now that is weird:)

[Jane]

I have to eat M&Ms by color, and always the green ones last. So I can relate to your M&M weirdness. :) And I also was a sleepwalker (related to #3) for a while, around junior high.

Fascinating stuff! Thanks for playing along!

[hilaire]

I'd vote for charming and quirky. This was such a great list!! I LOOOVED the jail survival plan.

[esperanza]

I do the m&m thing too, but I really prefer for them to be the same color (2 greens, 2 reds, whatever). It's so good to know I'm not the only weird person out there!

[Medieval Woman]

WN, you are way cool - this list is great! I have a similar weird thing with Skittles - they have to be even in my mouth and I eat them by color, leaving the best colors for last - I reject all purple Skittles...

[Tenured Radical]

Well, as for J. Edgar Hoover, I was so obsessed with him and organized crime as a kid that I ended up writing my diss and my first book about them.

And yes, everyone has an M & M ritual -- mine was always to eat all the brown ones first, then eat selectively so that there were even numbers of all the other colors, then eat in descending order of prettiness: yellow, red, orange, green. Now that they have added blue I don't know what to do.

As for the prison anxiety -- I have this fantasy that I would be able to read non-stop. But the clothes are icky, they don't let you shower every day, and then there are the involuntary sexual activities.

TR

[Terminal Degree]

Wow, I was just thinking of Betsy-Tacy today. I'm going to have to dust those off and read them again! Maybe this time I'll actually finish the last book in the series, which I never quite understood as a little girl. :)

[Pilgrim/Heretic]

Oh, these are definitely charming more than deranged -- except for #4. M&Ms should be eaten One At A Time! You freak.