perfidy

I have been meme tagged by Princess Cat. I am enjoined to reveal my five weirdest habits. This presents a problem for me, given that by some estimations (my wife's, for example) all my habits are weird. By my estimation, none are. How can anything I do be weird. Weird, almost by definition, is what other people do. So, here I will attempt to figure out what my five weirdest habits are.

• Habit the first: I am absent minded, from a long line of absent minded forebears. This has, on occasion, caused me great consternation when I forget to bring along things like wallets, ID badges for work, cell phones, etc. To attempt to forestall this, I have developed a mantra that I must recite every time I leave the house. The Mantra contains everything I might need to survive outside the house. If I am interrupted, I must start the Mantra over or forget something. The Mantra also includes visual effects as I pat various pockets and bags to determine that the named items are in fact on my person.
• Habit the second: I am a fairly particular person. Once I determine the best, or most efficient means of doing something, I will do it that way forevermore. People have often said that I don't try new things. This isn't true – I regularly go through periods of experimentation to determine the optimal solutions to things. Then, I stick with the winner. For example, with spaghetti sauce, the experimentation phase lasted decades until I found the sweet basil marinara flavor. Now I only use that. Other things that have been decided include toothpaste brand and flavor, ketchup, steak sauce, soy sauce, bread, cracker, snack food, pizza toppings, milk, sausage, bacon, soap, shampoo, and many, many others. This creates a bit of a minefield for my wife, as buying the wrong thing can be disastrous. The only things that have not settled down, despite decades of experimentation, are shaving cream and jam.
• Habit the third: I order cheeseburgers plain, even though I will always add ketchup; and enjoy lettuce, tomatoes, and a few other additions. I do this to avoid any chance of mustard being placed on my cheeseburger.
• Habit the fourth: I sleep with a pillow over my head. But not just any pillow. It has to be an old down feather pillow that, through the years, has lost about half its feathers. A partially filled feather pillow still has some heft to it, yet is supremely moldable. It will conform perfectly to the shape of my lumpen head. Among the countless reasons that I hate summer, high in the rankings is the fact that if it is too hot I can't sleep with a pillow on my head due to heat dissipation concerns.
• Habit the fifth: According to my wife, most of my weirdness lies in how I sleep. The aforementioned pillow on the head is only part of the weirdness. I also have a banky. Not in the security blanket sense. I have a blanket that I love, because of its tactile features. It is an old fleece blanket, of the type where one side is smooth, and the other nubbly. In most fleece blankets, the nubbly side is very soft. But if you keep one of these around for a decade, and wash it frequently, then the nubbly side gets a little more, uh, nubbly. Verging on, but not quite getting to scratchy. A surface that is rough and soft at the same time. I love that. And I only have one blanket that has been aged to that sublime perfection. Therefore, it is my banky. The pillow and the banky are the two biggest parts of my sleep temperature regulation scheme. Normal blankets on the lower part of my body, banky around the shoulders, and pillow on the head. If I get too warm, I can stick a toe out from under the lower blankets. Or lift an arm and get a bit of fresh air into the torso region. Or move my head to allow more heat to radiate. Subtle adjustments can keep me perfectly comfortable all night. You may call it weird, I call it comfortable and efficient.

I generally don't ask other people to participate in memes. So if you feel like it, go right ahead and pretend that I asked you.

[wik] Last week, my son was sick with the flu. Desperate for comfort, he asked his mom for Daddy's special banky.