- Caffeine is not a stimulant for me. I don't know if it's because of the ADD, but I can ingest a lot of caffeine and have no issues with sleeping. I remember in college we'd hang at the Suburban late at night and I'd drink half a pot of coffee and drop off to sleep at 3am without any issues. I drink a lot of caffeine at work because it keeps me focused on work instead of the typical scatter-brained bouncing I normally do. I've been using insane amounts of Diet Pepsi to stay engaged at work, but it's not enough anymore. I'm tempted to try Red Bull and see if it helps me break through my procrastination (although I have been unusually productive this week at work and don't have anything hanging over my head for the weekend. Woohoo!).
- I have a semi-photographic memory (I say semi- because I remember nearly everything I see but find I forget some details as I get older). In some ways this is great, since when I'm looking for something around the house, I can picture exactly what was around it the last time I saw it. Problem is, I may picture CJ's bear on the bathroom counter next to his hairbrush, but not know which bathroom. This serves me well at work since I usually take the minutes for our project meetings--I have extraordinary recall of our decisions and findings from weeks earlier since seeing them in print cements them in my memory.
- My brain is packed with absolutely worthless knowledge. I won't even call it trivia, since this junk isn't important enough to be trivia. A recent example--two nights ago Tom and I were watching an installment of I Love the 70s on VH-1 and they did a segment on Mr. Whipple and the Charmin commercials. I instantly remembered (and shared with Tom) that Jennifer Wilson, who played Larry's love interest and eventual wife on the later seasons of Perfect Strangers, was Mr. Whipple's real-life daughter. Why, I may ask you, do I know that? Why would it ever be important? That will never be a Final Jeopardy question. I'm a smart cookie, I could cure cancer or balance the national budget, but I never will because I have this type of crap staining my cerebellum. (And go ahead, look it up on Google or iMDB--you know you want to. Unfortunately, I'm totally right.)
- I am obsessed with license plates. I associate the randomly generated plate numbers with patterns, forming words or relating them to phone numbers (for Illinois plates) or look for mathematical connections in the numbers. I must figure out any vanity plate I see. This time of year with the snowbirds around I see all sorts of states, and I get excited way beyond reason when I see a plate from Canada or Alaska. I once spent part of a drive home trying to factor in my head the number of permutations for AZ plates--not just the regular plates, but also the numbering conventions for the special veterans plates, historic vehicle plates, and other special issues. I might have done it, too, except I got hung up on the ones that would have to be thrown out for obscenity. Tom asked why I was so deep in thought, and I told him what I was thinking about and how many plates I had figured, and he was silent for a good two minutes before saying simply, "You're weird." So it makes this list.
- At work, when I go to the bathroom, I always go to the same stall even though the toilet paper holder has too much tension on the roll and I'm always frustrated that I have to rip off one to two squares at a time. After I go, I always try to use the middle sink which has the bad motion sensor and rarely works before I give up and use a different sink to wash my hands. I don't know why I do this. I'm not comfortable in any other stall, and you'd think I'd have learned after almost two years that the middle sink doesn't really work.
- Each morning when I get ready to leave, I have brush my teeth, apply my deodorant, and brush my hair in a particular order or I will forget a step and go to work with stinky pits or bad breath. I have no idea why. If I try to brush my teeth before I brush my hair, it takes me a bit to retrace and come back to what I need to do. I've always been like that, going back to teenage years. It's good thing I don't wear makeup, or I might never make it out of the bathroom.
You know, reading back through these, I wonder if I got a touch of Mom's OCD? I don't want my hands compulsively, but I do have my routines, my sense of order, and sometimes when I am seized by an idea that excites me I have to follow it until it's done--the weekend I got back from Kentucky, I went to the store and bought baskets and wooden boxes and rearranged my entire entertainment center beside I suddenly had a vision of what it should look like and couldn't rest till the vision became reality. Hmm. Don't think I've ever noticed that before.
