Ten weird things

All righty, Mona tagged me for this meme. I had trouble thinking of things that are weird about me, so I turned to Mr. Tangerine for help. Boy, did he have a lot of ideas!

1. I have a photographic memory, more or less—not as much as the people listed here, but more than most people I know. I’ll bet everyone else who’s really fast at solving crossword puzzles has some degree of eidetic memory.

2. One of the staples of my diet is the peanut butter and chocolate chip sandwich. I probably eat this sandwich about three times a week, often more.

3. My cervix fakes left but goes right (or is it the other way around?). This made the HSG test a bloody and painful mess, since that was done before a doctor described the misleading pathway. The HSG was eventually followed by eight intrauterine insems, most of which were acutely uncomfortable as assorted nurses and doctors attempted to navigate my tricky cervix. The last few went a little more smoothly when I could advise the clinician about the fakes-left thing. I thought about getting the Essure procedure done, but there’s a follow-up HSG to make sure the coils are in place. No, thanks.

4. When I was a kid and, um, an adult (but not much any more), I tended to count my steps if I was walking alone somewhere. It’s not an OCD thing—I think it was more to pass the time. Hey, in junior high, I used to pass the time while walking down the hall between classes by reading a book. I was klutzy, so it’s a mystery how I navigated the hallways and stairs with my face buried in a book.

5. When I was a kid, I tended to sniff things like money, books, and magazines. It must be a hereditary trait because Ben tends to smell things, too. And okay, I admit I still take a whiff of books and magazines. Don’t you? (Addendum: I drafted this last night. This afternoon, Ben sniffed some Legos. It was a little kit to make a Lego car, and the tires reeked.)

6. Mr. Tangerine insisted that I say I’m a closet exhibitionist.

7. I experience hypnagogic hallucinations. It only happens about once a year now, but it used to be more frequent. What happens is, I’ve recently drifted off to sleep, and become absolutely convinced I see spiders on the ceiling, on the wall above the bed, or on the covers. I sit up and begin shouting, “Spiders! Turn on the light! Turn on the light! Spiders!” I look around frantically, flipping the covers in a fruitless search for spiders. Mr. Tangerine’s job is to turn on the light, point out the lack of spiders, turn off the light, and lie there awake after I fall quickly back to sleep.

8. I won’t drink red wine. For a long time, I credited that to my (alcoholic) dad’s preference for red wine and to my fear of migraines. More recently, I heard that red wine’s one of the things supertasters (whose extra tastebuds are extra-sensitive to propylthiouracil) can’t abide. Aha!

9. Vanilla ice cream tastes horribly bitter to me. Can’t eat it. I used to find it sweet, but in the last five years or so (possibly since I was pregnant with Ben?), it’s become inedible. Even licking a dab of melted vanilla ice cream off my fingertip is strikingly unpleasant.

10. I don’t drink coffee or eat tiramisu. Coffee tastes unbearably bitter and burnt to me. Oddly enough, I like unsweetened tea despite the bitterness. Sweetened iced tea? Blech.

(Yeah, I know it’s cheating to squeeze three items out of the supertaster bit. It was either that or stop at number 8.)