Strange little me

Photo by figlioDiOrfeo

Yesterday, while I was in the initial throes of exchanging information with a new friend I’ve made, she posed an interesting challenge to propel the ‘getting to know each other’ process – Tell me ten facts about yourself that I cannot find in your 'about' page, or that you do not normally tell others about – After taking quick mental stock of what I have told on this blog (a frightful lot), I concluded that it was an easy peasy task. After all, I haven’t even begun to tap the hoard of my odd little quirks for the reading pleasure of the Internet world. The way I view it, I am a mass of charming oddities, a Kilimanjaro of achieved peculiarities and furthermore, I have worked hard to become this problematically, thorny, me. What’s the use of keeping all this (complication) perfection to myself? So I began by telling her that:

1. I wake up everyday at 5:20 to sweep and mop the hardwood floors of my home.
2. I iron everything. The sheets on my beds, the pillowcases, towels, my husband’s silk shorts, my own unmentionables...
3. I love to clean silver, I have a lot of silver in my house, it is all very shiny.
4. By the end of the day, I will have swept and mopped the floors at least three more times. I have a toddler and that should explain everything.

Are you noticing what I did as I sputtered to a halt on number 4? At 40% of my to be completed list, all my Freudian-slipped particulars were about cleaning and/or stuff related to neatness. Hmmm… #5 was to have been how 99% of my son’s toy sets have all their parts intact, because I find it impossible to put away any of his playthings until all their pieces have been accounted for, but I stopped myself just before breaking down about the MIA medieval catapult that’s still the bane of my existence, and wrote this instead:

5. I like to skip rope.
6. I nearly drowned in the sea once (but not twice). ;-)

Again I stopped. I have to admit that I really really wanted #7 to be about how I cannot abide streaky glass which is why my Windex and I are the best of chums, but I held a steady course away from neat freak-o confessions.

7. I was a narration and voice-over artist and I recorded for TV commercials that were run on MTV and CNN Spanish all over Latin America.
8. My father is currently making a political bid for the Presidency of my native country.

Boooring…

At number 9 the straight lines syndrome wanted to sneak in. Anybody whose eyes bug out when they clap their peepers on crooked stuff should recognize this one.

Real number 9:

9. If a frame is hung askew, my internal leveler must see the matter immediately rectified,
lest
I
self
im-
PLODE.

But I held it at bay with a completely unrelated admission.

Alternate number 9:

9. I hate sad endings. I used to pay my friends to first go and watch the movies I wanted to see so that they could tell me if the ending was sad. A positive on the “sad” issue and that put an end to my desire to see the movie. That’s how I can’t claim to have seen “Like Water for Chocolate or Steel Magnolias.” I hate movies where characters I might like, die off.

By the time #10 finally rolled around, I felt positively exhausted with the exercise. More appropriately, I felt bad about hiding my true nature. After all, if somebody wishes to like me, they should do so with the grounding knowledge of my obsessive compulsive self. My personality is firmly anchored to certain cleaning and ordering urges and it is too late to teach me new tricks. There is nothing wrong with that, right? Isn’t everybody a bit like me? Here's how I polished off my ten facts however:

10. I don’t know how to play chess.

What I should have said:

10. Bev: It is best you know this upfront - I'm a little strange.

__________

I want to hear one of your quirks. Tell me.