i am neurotic.

Whenever I have to kill a spider, bug or fly that’s gotten into the house, I always tell them I’m very sorry for killing them but they can’t live with me.

My cat cannot be around anyone holding or even touching a guitar. He has no problem with a guitar on the wall, sitting on the bed next to him or music being played by a guitar. A person reaching for one makes him high tail it into another room.

my dog will only ever sit on the far right end of any couch in the house and will only sleep there if there is one pillow, not none, not two, but one. he sits and waits by the couch until his spot is ‘prepared.’

In my house when i walk down the staircase and the lights are off upstairs, i always have to RUN down the steps as quick as i can, because i think that a jaguar will emerge from a room and chase me if i don’t run fast enough. I’ve been doing it for 10 years and i can’t stop.

Every time a cat yawns I try to grab it’s tongue in an ironic nod to the cliche “cat got your tongue.” For simplicity’s sake, and so I don’t hurt the cat, I have shortened the maneuver so that I just poke the tongue before the cat closes its mouth. I recently started doing it to my boyfriend and I think he’s scared to yawn around me now.

Whenever my dog poops outside, I have to put my hand in it to make sure nothing weird is in there (or valuable). My dog always takes my jewelry and sometimes swallows it. I’m afraid if I don’t check, then I will be throwing away my jewelry.

I would change my entire outfit when I babysat my sister’s cats and had to change their litter box. And then I would change my clothes back.

when I was a little girl, my dad told me a story (fabricated) about how a big snake had crawled up through the pipes in his aunt’s house, come up through the toilet, and bitten her on the butt as she was sitting down. It terrified me, so my mom made my dad reassure me that the story was not true. I still leave both toilet seats down; the seat and the one that covers the seat. Just in case a snake gets in the pipes.

Whenever I ride a bicycle I can only get on it from the left side, because as a child I always pretended my bike was a horse, and a horse is mounted from the left side. I still follow this habit.

I refuse to read the book Marley and Me because I know that the author is eventually going to write about the dog’s death and I’ll cry. Even though I work in a veterinary office and deal with the death of pets on a regular basis, I refuse to read the book because I want to save myself the heartbreak.