Weird is as weird does

I'm convinced that everyone everywhere has at least one completely strange habit. Male or female, bald or hairy, braniac or a few fries short of a Happy Meal: everyone is, in some way or another, a great big weirdo.

I have a friend who (and I won't share her name on account of the potentially embarrassing information I'm about to share - cough! her name is Tara! cough, cough!) used to like being balanced in every sense of the word. At one point in our friendship, if I jokingly punched her right arm, she would turn and instruct me to sock her on the left arm as well. Not harder or softer, mind you, but the exact same punch. Then she would follow me around until I did it right so she could get on with her day. And she just couldn't understand all the raised eyebrows.

Adam, when he's feeling domestic, uses the largest bowl we own to mix things, regardless of what he intends to make. If he's making a quadruple batch of waffles, then sure, that makes sense. But using a 14-inch diameter bowl to mix tuna and mayonnaise for two sandwiches? Who does that kind of thing? He thinks it's totally normal.

My parents have this clunky old microwave that I'm almost positive was manufactured in the seventies. The thing is a nightmare! It takes a good two minutes to melt half a cube of butter. On the highest setting. That's insane, right? But they're used to it, so it doesn't seem odd to them.

My own little quirk? I can't type.

Scratch that. I can type; I can't type correctly. My hands start out in some semblance of a correct position, but my pointer and middle fingers do most of the work. Plus, I have to look at the keyboard. A lot. Still, I'm pretty fast. It just looks ridiculous to anyone who can type correctly. I'm not sure how this happened. I took a computer class - not a typing class, a computer class - in the eighth grade. It was only for one quarter, with less than two weeks spent learning how to type properly. And I didn't quite master it, I guess. I haven't taken a computer class since and I haven't ever had a job in which typing skills were pertinent.

In fact, until last March, when I visited my sister in Utah, I never really stopped to think about my typing technique being strange (but then who really stops to think about typing technique at all?). Once she found out, though, she informed me that my typing does, indeed, make me a freak. On the one hand, being a freak isn't the worst thing in the world. I've unknowingly lived with it for this many years - why change now? On the other hand, it is rather pathetic. I'm almost thirty years old. I live in the age of computers, for crying out loud, and not knowing how to type correctly is not simply a laughable matter; if I ever needed to find work, this could be seen by many employers as a serious flaw.

I suppose my next course of action should be to take a typing course, or to get online and figure out how to do this thing right. And I will. At some point. But right now I have a more pressing matter: I need to find a good hiding place for a 14-inch diameter bowl.