i am neurotic.

When I eat any sort of colourful candy, like M&Ms or jubes, I empty a few into my palm, and eat them according to colour. I eat the citrus coloured ones first, then backwards according to the rainbow, and then brown if it’s there.

Whenever I say something I have to repeat the sentence back to myself in my head. I analyze the sentence and determine whether it came out the way I wanted it to come out. When this first started I would also mouth the words and sometimes say the whole sentence out-loud a second time.

When I set my alarm at night the ending digit has to be 6. always. (5:16, 5:36, :5:56) If I end it in a normal number, I consider it a jinx and I will surely sleep through it.

Whenever I’m served mashed potatoes and gravy, I have to first shape my dollop of potatoes into a cone, make a hollow in the center, then fill the crater to the top with gravy. As soon as I’ve gotten everything else on my plate, I have to let some of the gravy escape it’s pit and slide down the side, like a volcano. I always feel immensely immature, but I can’t eat in any other way.

When I am in an uncomfortable situation I start to write random words and sentences with my finger where ever I can, like my leg or on walls, or I’ll imagine them writing themselves out in my mind.

Whenever I’m on the city or school bus and looking out the window, I have to blink whenever the lines on the sidewalk are exactly next me. Or I have to blink whenever I feel that the bus is in between the separate panels of sidewalk.

Every time I send an email that contains an attachment at work, I open the document one more time just to make sure that I didn’t type any curse words by accident. Sometimes I open it more times after that just to make sure!

I have a very unnatural fear/anger/hatred of pick up trucks. When I see one in my rear view on in the lane next to me, I have to change lanes to get away from it. This neuroses is empirically based, whenever I get cut off or some idiot is driving like a dumb-ass, invariably, it is always someone in a pick up. I won’t even ride in one!

I have a fear of running on pavement while barefoot and tripping onto my toe, scuffing the front of it and my toenail on the ground. Because of this I always wear shoes in the summer and walk very carefully if they are open-toe.

Whenever I see a sign on a highway that denotes distances to multiple cities (ie. New York – 50 miles, Philadelphia, 125 miles), my brain goes into a mode that causes me to find the next number in the sequence that both numbers are divisible by. In the above example, the correct answer is 250. It gets much more difficult when the sign is something like 7 miles vs 22 miles.