Anonymous Communist

This morning, before school, while The Girl was brushing her teeth, I was helping The Boy get dressed.

I picked up a shoe, and noticing it was the right one I put it down and grabbed the left shoe and put it on him. Then I noticed I did that. For some reason, I always put my left shoe on first, and I’m extending that weirdness to my kids.

It’s interesting that people have such odd habits. Or perhaps compulsions is a better word. Thinking about it, I have a few more weird compulsions besides just the shoe thing:

• If I have any sort of meal involving French fries, I always eat all the fries before I eat anything else.
• If I’m playing cards, specifically Euchre, I won’t pick up my hand until after the dealer turns over the trump bid card.
• When I used to smoke, I had a ritual with opening a new pack of squares: Tap the pack three times one way, three times the other, then take the third cigarette from the right. Because of this, I could only buy smokes in the hard pack. If my brand wasn’t available all hard-like, I’d get something else that was.
• When I go to the grocery, I have to go up and down the aisles the same direction every time. My little peabrain can’t handle deviating from this. Even if I am after only one item, I have to enter the aisle from the correct side. Thankfully, Mrs. Communist indulges my ridiculous compulsion; if there’s an aisle in which we don’t need anything, she’ll skip it and move on to the next one. But I’ll dutifully go down that aisle and meet up with her in the next one.

Wow… looking at that list, that seems pretty pathetic. There’s a word for people like me, and that word is “freak.” But I guess most everyone has certain weird things they do. Take Susie Derkins, for example. I know she disassembles her sandwiches and eats each ingredient separately, which makes her a Grade A nimrod.