unspectacular quirks

my friend, erin, asked me to post about a few of my unspectacular quirks that people may not know about. here goes...

i am obsessive about keeping a journal. i was going to try to tone down the word obsessive, but i think that it is probably appropriate in this case. i have a written account for every day of my life since i was 12 years old. dead serious. i used to write individual entries for each day, but now, i usually write weekly, while still accounting for the events of each day. my journals are probably terribly boring. almost certainly, actually. they are not a diary so much, but really are an account of my day to day activities. a travel log. it's not that they are emotionless, but for the most part, they are not terribly thrilling, either. but i have stopped caring what they may be like for other people to read because other people don't read them, and when they will, i will probably be dead and i won't care. the main reason that i do it is because it is therapeutic for me.

i am abnormally prone to wearing holes in the armpits of my shirts. i have no idea why, but that is probably the number one reason that i end up getting rid of shirts. maybe it is because i insist on doing 100 jumping jacks a day... okay, that was a joke. hopefully you already knew that.

one of my most prized possessions is my ti-83 calculator. the silly thing is, i rarely used it as a graphing calculator, even when i was pursuing my math degree. i don't know how to use approximately 75% of the functions on the calculator, but i prefer it over any other lesser calculator. i think it is because of the screen that allows me to see the steps i've taken. and the memories of mr. haldane's calculus class.

i love making lists. i undoubtedly get this from my mother. lists make me feel so much better in life because they quantify and bound the tasks that float about in my head and make me feel overwhelmed when they are so uncontained. i often make lists that never get looked at again, but made me feel better just to make them.

i have a thing for ticonderoga no. 2 pencils. mechanical pencils will not do. they squeak and scratch when they write and their erasers are insubstantial. but a ticonderoga... now there's a pencil you can depend on. and if you give me one that has just been sharpened to a pristine point in an electric pencil sharpener...