Meet My Idiosyncrasies

When bls tagged me to list my five top idiosyncrasies, my first response was, "Only five?" Because I am nothing but a bundle of idiosyncrasies. My next response was, "Hey, sister -- yer takin' all my idiosyncrasies!" Because if you read through hers you will find a certain resonant harmony with my own list...stuff like my obliviousness to my living space (even while nursing fantasies of a very mindfully created arts-and-craftsy Carl Larssonesque home), the disconnect between my desire to be organized and my disorganized reality, and my short-lived magnificent obsessions with certain subjects or authors or artistic genres.

But, because I do have a long list, I was finally able to come up with five of my own (more or less). They're not necessarily the main ones at this very moment, but...my quirks tend to cycle, so tomorrow they very well may be. And they are:

1. I am at once very easily bored and very easily amused; more the former, which can be a dangerous condition in a world where a large percentage of daily life is...well...boring. Damned boring, in fact. (The other day, trapped as an unwilling listener in a gaggle discussing nail extensions in excruciating detail, I thought for a moment that I might actually die of boredom, right there in front of God and everybody.) I often find myself gratuitously multitasking, or investing in self-study courses (with varying degrees of sucess), or inventing little mental games, to unbore msyelf. This is why I always think I'm on the cusp of full-fledged Internet addiction; because when you're really, really bored, the ability to summon vast amounts of information and entertainment at a mouseclick is a lot like those bars that lab rats press for rat chow...it's easy to just keep pressing, pressing, pressing the bar. (And yet -- here I am.) The things that amuse me, on the other hand, tend to be things that bore the people around me: nature; people-watching; lazy, rainy days indoors; certain repetitive tasks like kneading bread or mowing the lawn or sewing cross-stitches -- which brings me to:

2. Short-lived craft obsessions. It's been this way ever since I was a little kiddo, eagerly pursuing and then discarding nylon-loop potholder weaving, spool knitting and the like. Every five years or so, it seems, I get a crafting bug -- usually needlework of some kind. I pursue it with passion. Then I wake up one morning and I've lost that lovin' feeling; the needlework basket gets pushed back into the dark recesses of the hall closet. Five years later the cycle comes around again.

Many years ago, when I was heavily into the Textile-Crafting-As-Sacramental-Sign-of-Powerful-Female-Archetype mode, and also had a friend with a great passion for quilting, I decided to empower my womynself and honor the discounted creativity of my female ancestors by taking up crazy quilting...I had an aunt who in her younger days had made beautiful ones out of very homely, cast-off fabrics, and her example also inspired me. So I got into it full-tilt boogie. Until I found out that, while I loved selecting my fabrics and embroidering around the pieces of the finished blocks, I really hated the actual piecing process, because I honestly don't know how to sew; and I couldn't figure out how to do the actual quilting. So I got over it. (But I wound up with a nice framed wall hanging that's still in my kitchen.) I went through the same process with counted cross-stitch -- not those sissy, childish patterns you find in women's magazines, but patterns from A Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady and neo-Prairie School samplers. (One of my craft downfalls is my tendency, in my burst of enthusiasm, to push the envelope of my skill. I'm like the kid who wants to play jazz without knowing the scales. Monograms on tea towels are boring -- let's try a recreation of the Bayeux Tapestry!) A few years ago when I was having some health problems that left me nervous as a cat both out of anxiety and because of the meds I was taking, I decided to take up knitting; I'd read the story of a 100-year-old blind woman in an area nursing home who knitted, by feel, hats for charity, and I thought, "That's how I want to go out -- doing something useful." So I taught myself how to knit, using one of those "Knitting For Drooling Idiots" books. I even taught myself how to make mittens. I made, like, 12 pairs of them for the local mitten drive, plus hats. I was cranking out hats and scarves and mittens every week; a regular knitting fool. Then I got busy, and one day I realized I wasn't knitting anymore. And didn't want to. So the craft club at the local senior highrise wound up with my yarn. But I still have my needles, and all my other crafting tools, because...you never know.

3. I am a procrastinator extraordinaire. And the thing is...it works for me. When I read time-management books that tell me how much more I will accomplish, and how much better it will be, if I don't wait until the last minute, my reaction is, No, I won't. No, it won't. Whenever I fuss over my writing, edit and re-edit it, it winds up mediocre; it's when I'm under the gun, surfing the adrenalin rush, that the words spill out in just the right way. Back in junior high school, my first academic all-nighter involved a report on ancient Egypt; this for a teacher who warned us repeatedly, "No one who procrastinates on projects will get an A in my class." As usual, I waited until the day before the due date to even begin writing the thing, and was still finishing up shortly before the schoolbus arrived. It was 30 pages long, including appendices. I got an A+; vindication.

4. I have an unnatural affection for 1)soap; and 2)indoor plumbing. The way I figure it, if you have to have a jones, a jones for sudsy, herbally handcrafted soap made by righteous backwoods hippies is a fairly innocuous one to have. Some people are offended by gifts of soap; I say, "Bring it on!" (I remind myself of a woman I once read about, a native of the Solomon Islands who married a European sea captain back during the days of copra trading in the early 1900's, who was fascinated by soap; it was the only artifact of western society, other than her husband himself, that seemed to interest or please her. He'd would come back from his travels with a whole crate of soap for her, and she'd be as happy as a child at Christmas.) Now, the indoor plumbing thing is obviously problematic for someone like me who otherwise loves being out-of-doors, since activities like camping usually require varying degrees of bear-in-the-woods personal hygiene that test my balance, my dexterity, my bladder control and, as St. Teresa said in another context, my ability to be displeasing to myself (and possibly to others). I haven't quite worked this one out to my satisfaction. But obviously I want to pack extra soap. And TP. Maybe an empty coffee can. I really don't want to think about it too much.

5. I hate left-hand turns. Especially in strange-big-city driving, which I find a white-knuckle ordeal anyway. (This is what happens when you grow up in a small town, with highly unenthusiastic drivers for parents.) My philosophy is that you can get anywhere in the world by making right-hand turns...it's just a matter of spiraling toward your goal, which is kind of an evocative way of getting around in the world anyway. That's what I tell myself.

Anyhow -- five of my quirks. Now you know.

And...hmmm...let's see...I tap J.C., Kathryn, Songbird, Lorna and Cathy.

Postscript: You know, I have to add one more idiosyncrasy, because this one is probably more self-defining than #5; don't know why I didn't think of it sooner: I am a softy. Not to the casual observer; I put on a good show of, depending on the context, brisk, dispassionate professionalism or mildly amused detachment. But I'm really a sentimental sap. I weep copiously at the flicks; at predictable moments, like Bergman and Bogie on the tarmac in Casablanca, Ruth's death scene in Fried Green Tomatoes or the "You make me want to be a better person!" scene in As Good As It Gets...but also at the oddest moments during the oddest films. Cold Comfort Farm, one of my favorites, is a very funny, quirky British comedy that is not exactly It's a Wonderful Life; yet in the final minutes, when all the loose ends of the plot come together and everyone lives happily ever after, I get all sniffly. I tell you, it's embarrassing. I don't want to be like Nathan Lane in The Birdcage. (Which I think I may have shed a tear during, come to think of it.)

Exhibit A, Quirk #2