Weird things I used to do...

-Clothes used to have to go on certain hangers, the exact hangers they came off of. And not because of any special qualities of the hanger (padded, wooden, etc). Some of these were just the cheapie dry cleaning hangers. But I felt like, for some reason, something bad would happen if the clothes weren't returned to the order I'd established. (Remember this, Becky?)

-Kept all my my make up in the individual boxes each product came in. Probably this once had a logical reason, like knowing the name of the product in case the sticker on the bottom of the bottle wore off, but it became another of those little things I obssessed about.

-Checked my alarm clock three times to make sure it was set. Only twice wasn't enough. If I accidently checked four times, then I had to go one more and make it five. Something about those even numbers...

-Whatever outfit I was wearing on a particularly bad day was from then on banned from being worn again. This I learned the hard way after wearing a sweater vest (that alone should have been bad enough) once and getting into a car accident and then a year later, deciding to give it another chance, and getting my first moving violation.

But I'm better now...at least on a few of those things. I don't do any of those things anymore (except the bad day outfit thing) because it's mainly superstition and fear of the unknown that pushed me to try to make rules for the universe (which the universe largely ignores anyway). Plus, I think superstition can almost reach fanatic heights and people follow the rules more religiously than they do their own religion. So, I try to remind myself that I'm a Lutheran instead : )

In spite of that, there are a few things that still get to me and I have to fix before I can relax.

-I hate seeing shoes tipped over on their sides or upside down. I think it just freaks me out, just like it does when I see shoes abandoned this way on the road. I blame this on Stephen King and his short story, "The Body." In it, a kid is killed by a train and knocked out of his shoes. So, at home, I have to tip shoes so their soles are on the ground.

-On light switch plates with multiple switches, it bugs me when one is up and one is down if both lights are actually on or off. In other words, if you have multiple switches for one light, you can turn it on in one place and turn it off in another and then your lightswitches are all out of sync.

-I have to check to make sure I've locked the door to my house at least twice. Even though I'm pretty sure I locked it, I always have to get out of the car and check. Unless I talk myself through the actual locking process of the door. "You're locking the door, Stacey. You don't have to come back and check." But then I'm just as likely as to suspect that I'm actually remembering telling myself that yesterday and I might have forgotten today. This I blame on my mother who, for as long as I can remember, sends herself into a panic after she's already three blocks or more away from home because she can't remember if she put the garage door down. And she doesn't trust her instinct, so we have to go back unless someone else in the car can verify that she did, in fact, put the door down and said person watched the door until it reached the ground and the door did not bounce back up due to some unforseen object in its path. Hee. That is soooo me.

What do you guys have to do? What weird things make you crazy? This reminds me of the episode of Friends with Monica and the shoes, and Richard, her boyfriend at the time, whose "thing" was that he needed to face the ocean.