Oh, fuck it…because I am feeling particularly weird habit-addled tonight — FIVE MORE:

1) I sleep with a soft, pink blanket I have had since infanthood. It is called “The Pink Softie” (pronounced “saw-fee”) and it has traveled with me to hotel rooms all over the world. I can’t sleep without it. It’s on my lap right now, as a matter of fact. It’s not a security thing; it’s a tactile thing.

2) I absolutely, positively CANNOT walk barefoot outside — even two steps out the front door onto the painted wooden porch to retrieve the mail. To walk barefoot on asphalt would quite literally result with me requiring hospitalization for textural and psychological trauma. Even padding around barefoot in the house kills me. And further, I cannot understand how people wear shoes inside the house. It must be the Asian in me, but there is something almost disrespectful about wearing shoes indoors. And for those of you who think I am totally insane because these two oddities are in direct opposition to each other — I always wear slippers when inside. Always. It’s a tactile thing.

3) I have a very difficult time actually touching pizza. I require the use of a knife and fork to eat it. It’s not an eating disorder thing; it’s a tactile thing.

4) I am a classic synaesthete and have been since I acquired language (I am on official medical record as having spoken in FULL sentences at just over 9 months old. How fucking SATANIC is THAT? I’d be mixing some holy water with that Similac, goddamnit.) I frequently see and smell sounds…and numbers each have their own corresponding color. When I am writing, I see “strings of light” in my head onto which words, shapes, sounds, smells, textures, and (oddest of all) various people and their voices are suspended for my use and perusal; for some reason, the lights are particularly bright when I am working on poetry. Also, much to my amusement, people frequently assume I am some overachieving academic with a graduate degree, and are almost always tickled to find that I am, in fact, a high school dropout who spent her entire senior year blissfully truant at the Fresno County Library, quite literally starting at one end and working my way through. Oh, yeah…and the cherry on top is that I have almost zero grasp of anything above about 4th grade math. My brain, she don’t work that way, I am afraid. I am a mathematical moron.

5) I cannot watch any old television show or movie without immediately knowing the real life names of each and every performer (even secondary and supporting), director, producer, and/or writer associated with it. And their entire life story. And their spouses and lovers. And the names of their children. And when they died and how. And any scandal or skullduggery with which they might have been associated. In other words, I have pretty much total voracious yet pointless recall when it comes to anything I have read or seen and in which I am interested — including film or television credits that may have rolled before my eyes when I was 5. I call myself The Font of Useless Knowledge. My husband calls me a Mousiant Savant.