On a brighter note...

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Name one quirky thing that you did as a child.

This is what I did between the ages 7 and 9. 12 Was my favourite number and I used to eat 12s off the TV screen. It got to the point that my mum had to tell me not to do it anymore.

Have to ask - how did you eat them?

Talking about eating, one thing i remembered (mother confirmed it and told me i must have been round 2 y old but she had no idea why i did it at the time, so when i told her she laughed really hard), I used to lick door knobs a lot, especially the living room one, because i once found some chewing gum stuck on one of the knobs (didn't find the idea the least bit disgusting at the time ) and i was hoping there would be more soon....so i scratched the door knobs with my fingernails to find gum, or just licked them.

I used to take apart door knobs. Eventually, my father got really annoyed with this interest.

When I was in elementary school, I used avoid eating food from one of the suburbs near where I lived. I think it's because I bought some chips there once and I didn't like how they tasted all that much.

Oh, let's see:

Keeping caterpillars as pets, but having a phobia about moths.
Deciding I used to be a cat and telling my pre-school teacher that I had eaten cat food.
Reading medical brochures at 6 years old and quoting them to my teacher, without knowing what they actually meant.

This is all I can remember right at this moment, but there are almost certainly others.

I'd pretend to grab them and eat them, like Cookie Monster eats cookies.

That's so freaking adorable!

I used to keep grasshoppers as pets, and when they died.. I ate them! My parents were horrified when I told them this years later.

I also used to frequently get moments when I felt a chill like a ghost passing over me and I'd have to run and curl up in my bed. Much like a cat flips out for no apparent reason.

I thought pets and family members had been replaced by robot clones sometimes, and would refuse to speak to them for this reason. I read later this is a prodrome of schizophrenia in adults.. what about in children? For all I knew it was entirely possible.

I spent a lot of time with my grandma when I was little, and one story she tells me often is how I used to say that I'd hold my own hand as I crossed the street, rather than hers.

Only one quirky thing, huh? How to choose..... ok, here's a good one.

I used to "name" the road-sign arrows. You know, the black-on-yellow signs that indicate an upcoming curve. I gave them all relational descriptions. There was "Father Arrow" (he was rather large) and "Cousin Arrow" (actually there were several of these, and not on our usual routes; they were scattered about and we didn't see them often, something like real cousins) and "Grandfather Arrow" (he was enormous and looked like he'd been there a long time).

Oddly, I didn't have either a close family or intimate knowledge of an extended one. Maybe the arrows somehow *were* my family.

Was that quirky enough?

I used to have one of those necklaces that are like a metal ball with chimes inside. I would stick it in my mouth and spit it out really hard, over and over and over.

I crawled around like a cat and gave my mother toy mice. But I took it further than a lot of people: I even peed in my room to "mark my territory" (the cats themselves got blamed), and would climb fences and crawl around staring down cats who didn't belong in our yard (thought I was helping our cats with their territory issues there too, the neighbor cats probably thought I was just really really strange).

I used to hide behind my hair and honestly thought nobody could see me either (mind you I was a teen).

At a really crowded school function of some sort (also a teen) I once flopped down on my back and flipped glow-sticks back and forth in front of my eyes. (This kind of thing is why people always thought I was on drugs. The reality was I was just way more into the sensory aspects of objects than their function, regardless of the object.)

Last edited by anbuend on 06 Feb 2011, 9:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Hm... I remember a few things...

I tried to make ants walk in a straight line by messing with their "scent" patterns.

I used to have fun with "rolly polly rafting"... where I'd send those little pillbugs on their very own boating adventure. It would usually involve dried leaves and a steam of water running down the side of the road.

And another time I caught a black widow spider with a bug catcher's kit. I was so excited until I showed it to my mom. She didn't seem as pleased about it as I was.

I chewed on my hair as a young child.... yuk!

I did that too - I'd forgotten. Another thing for me was that I'd refuse to drink out of a plastic cup - it had to be a glass - everyone knew this.

i did that (i used to have long hair).

i used to climb doors, like a jungle gym. every hinge in the house is now bent (except the ones that had to be replaced).

I also used to repel down our porch (i was 3 and repelling down an 8 foot porch, like a very small rock climber on a very small cliff), i miss that porch.

I use to keep garden worms in my pockets from age 2-9 I think, not the same one's, I would dig them up each morning or when I could.