Thirteen Oddities

Thirteen Odd Things You May Not Know About NPW (In playing along with Noelle's Ten Dirty Little Secrets) 1. My clothes closet is organized by color, then in long sleeve to short sleeve order (with 3/4 length sleeves somewhere in between). Then pants, skirts, dresses, in that order. Sometimes shirts with patterns throw me off so much I can't decide which color they belong with, so they are relegated to the back of the closet where I promptly forget that I own them. My shoes are another story; they have an entire room devoted to them. Well, shoes and Christmas decorations, and a clothes rack, and Chris's shoes, and a couple of tables. But mostly shoes. 2. I have a compulsive need for car's radio display to be dust-free. While the rest of my car looks like the city dump had an avalanche that spilled directly into my backseat, I am always careful to lovingly remove any speck of dust that might marr my view of the radio station. 3. My use of commas is excessive and sometimes egregious. I'm aware of this and I am constantly re-reading my writing to make sure it doesn't look ridiculous. 4. Ten years later, I remain absurdly proud of my perfect score on the SAT II Writing test. As you can clearly see, that perfect score brought me big things: a whopping teacher's salary and a half-assed blog. 5. I can feel a nervous tic coming on when kids use the three-hole punch in the library and drop the little punched out holes all over the orange carpeting. If I catch them, I make them pick up every single one. If I don't see the actual culprit, I've found myself on more than one occasion down on hands and knees picking them up. Time to invest in a dust buster, maybe? 6. I'm irrationally afraid of being murdered. Likely this is due to a combination of factors: too much Court TV, a fear of the dark, and a somewhat hysterical mother who insists on calling me daily with updates on local Boston crime. 7. I prefer good beer to good wine. Does that make me less girly? Maybe. I don't care. Nothing is better than a delicious beer and pizza combo. 8. Every morning when I wake up I have to do things in the exact same order: coffee, shower, dress, lunch, dry hair, pack up, goodbye to Chris, out the door. If I don't do it in this order every day, I inevitably forget something and I can't be held acccountable for going into school half-dressed with wet hair and no lunch. 9. I get an ominous feeling when I step on cracks in the sidewalk or spill salt. I scoff at superstition, but deep down I still get a panicky, anxious feeling. 10. I have very strange cuticles. They're kind of non-existent, except when I somehow manage to snag one on something and it rips to shreds and causes a bloody mess. 11. If I know I am having guests over to my apartment I will obsessively clean and tidy, even if that means shoving everything "extra" into Chris's office room. We might be messy, but at least we can manage to be privately messy. 12. Having my wisdom teeth out was the worst experience of my life. That might make me sound like a huge wuss, but if you've never experienced a dry socket and a sadistic oral surgeon shoving 12 yards of gauze into a hole drilled into your jaw then you have no right to judge me. Plus, I woke up from the surgery to find my father laughing at me and my clothes covered in blood from where they had to drill my teeth out of my bone. Traumatizing. 13. I eat my lunch at 10:30 every school day. That means on the weekends I am absolutely starving by noon- which ends up being breakfast. Then I skip lunch because otherwise it would ruin my 5 p.m. dinner time. It also means that when all you normal people are eating lunch, I am pretty much done with my work day. Yeah, schools.