Isn't it Weird?

When you live in a cookie cutter world,
Being different is a sin.
So you don't stand out,
But you don't fit in.

- Hanson, Weird

Again, I don't usually do memes. But I do make a few exceptions to this rule, although I make up for these transgressions by never passing them on to other people.

This particular meme comes to me from darkhalf, and it involves writing down six weird things about yourself. Personally, this fascinated me, as I do make an effort to promote the fact that I'm not exactly your normal person: I collect episodes of weird events in my life, maintain a tendency to think of strange things at inappropriate times, and somehow remain silent enough to blend into a crowd despite the invisible monkey perched on my shoulder.

In short, I know perfectly well that I'm a weird person. But it doesn't matter how weird a person you think you are -- if you put six things on that list that everybody knows about you already, then you're about as weird as a sack of unpeeled potatoes.

So now I have to think of six weird things about me that I haven't already made known to the public. That means that I can't mention anything about the stuffed toy collection, the studies in combinatorics, the efforts to combine two random words together in one phrase just to short-circuit peoples' brains... I can't mention anything that I've already mentioned to a lot of people somewhere. That makes this an incredibly difficult task... and that you'd all better appreciate the effort I'm going through. :)

1. I work a lot of pop culture references into a lot of the essays I write, just to see if people will spot them. Some of them are subtle and some of them aren't, but I put them in anyway. I don't know where these come from, to be honest -- it's not as though I encounter them in everyday conversation. Bah weep granah weep ninni bong?

2. Despite the fact that I can draw, I don't promote my skills in that area. I only use my drawings as character studies (and I make the occasional doodle whenever I get bored), but I don't go out and advertise myself as an artist. I think I can actually do design consultations about as well as I do literary critiques.

3. I don't eat much in the way of candy or chocolate, and this was the case even back when I was a kid. My peers would happily tear into a package of jellybeans at about the same time I would bite into a dish of steamed vegetables. I still find it strange that people would love these excessive bits of sugar, mind you.

4. I don't like the prospect of insulting other people, although I can probably throw around a bunch of "yo' mama" jokes with the best of them. I usually only direct insults at others under three circumstances: Either it's completely unintentional, or it's something that I can apologize for afterwards, or the person has done something that really rubs me the wrong way.

5. I always look into a woman's eyes whenever I speak to her. From what I hear, this is an incredible achievement for a guy, especially considering that their eyes will wander to a woman's chest or cleavage most of the time. Whenever I do realize that my gaze is tending in such a direction, I just turn and look at something else.

6. I hate Sudoku. I simply abhor this puzzle. I literally have to restrain myself from bawling out its many fans the moment I hear about their enthusiasm for the game. I was solving Sudoku puzzles when I was six years old (yes, it's been around for a while), and its current popularity just... confounds me. Where were these people twenty years ago?