The only slightly aged Old MD Girl, a fellow MD/PhD student, recently tagged me with a circulating “seven weird things” meme. Apparently the idea is to write about seven weird things about yourself? I’ll give it a shot. The hardest part of this will be limiting it to seven.

I am going to tag a few people to continue this tradition right off the bat before I forget: the lovely lady behind PetersDigest, the sage Dr. Robey at Hope for Pandora, the future trophy wife at Vanity Fairest, the Chicagoan of LivinginChicago, the red green pink-haired Island Med Student, the almost-done(!) Dr. VonB of MudPhud Adventures, and Doctor David, who unfortunately seems rather normal.

Let’s begin.

1. My absolute favorite album of all time is A Charlie Brown Christmas (iTunes link) by Vince Guaraldi and his gang. No, I’m not just saying that because it’s nearing Christmas…I’m not even sure if I can concretely say why in the first place. Part of it is that it reminds me of family time decorating for Christmas and having this album blasting throughout the entire house (as much as I hate decorating for Christmas—or anything…you just have to take it all down in a few weeks again!). Another part of it is that I love jazz music, particularly piano jazz, and I think Vince Guaraldi was an absolute genius.
2. I really, really—really really really—want a Smart. I can’t entirely explain it. People definitely think I’m weird when I disclose this. But they’re just so small and practical-seeming. You can park anywhere. You can save gas. I am a singular individual who drives 6 miles to work on occasion; why on Earth would I need anything bigger than that? Why would anyone? If your reply is “to haul stuff…”, shut up.
3. A pet peeve of mine is when cereal boxes are not opened properly. The box should initially be opened with the top flap toward you and the bottom flap away from you, and the left half of the inner bag should have its two sides cleanly separated so that no cereal gets caught in crevasses or escapes through holes into the bottom of the box. This ensures an easy opening of the box followed by a nice clean pour with your right hand. Are you writing this down?? I will admit that some brands of cereal have finicky inner bags that are difficult to open cleanly, and for these I try to make exceptions; generic-brand cereals and Raisin Bran come to mind.
4. When I was in middle school, 7th grade to be exact, I was kind of a loner. I was a new kid in school, commuting back and forth from the next town over, where we lived for several months while our new house close to my school was being finished. Okay, to say I was a loner is an egregious understatement; I was much better at kickball and 4-Square than I had any business being, and I wore sweats to school every day. (I previously attended a parochial school with a dress code…get off my back.) The other necessary piece of background is that my mom is a terrible cook (just ask her) and liked to use up the previous night’s week’s leftovers, of which there were many, by popping them in my lunch bag, along with any other assorted scraps within reach. Severely bruised and/or inedible apples were perfectly fair game, as were weeks-old bananas barely fit even for banana bread, grapes, asparagus, beef stew in a sandwich bag, slices of bread (or half slices when the other half was particularly moldy and didn’t make the cut), charcoal garlic bread burned beyond rational explanation that the dog opted out on, etc. Observe Equation 1.
   Eq. 1 L×BF=1/FE
   where L=degree of lonerness, BF=bad food index, and FE=frequency of communal lunch eating with peers. As Equation 1 shows, as the degree to which one is a loner and/or the index describing the poor quality of food rises, frequency of communal dining decreases. This is known as the Ferguson youth principle, or the Ferguson value.With decreases in FE come increasing efforts to safely store one’s uneaten food, since throwing it out would be wasteful and disrespectful to one’s well-meaning mother, and actually eating the stuff was clearly out of the question. Usually the top shelf of a locker is the first location of choice, as this is not easily noticeable by fellow classmates, at least initially, and holds a fair amount of bagged lunches, especially as the fruits and vegetables soften, the meats are consumed by various bacteria and molds, and the lunches can be packed into this confined space that much more easily. And so for the first several weeks in residence at this new school, it went thusly. That is, it went thusly until after a while an enormous, undeniable stench filled my locker’s entire wing of the school and the locker in question had to be essentially emptied completely, wiped down with alcohol and/or bleach and/or 2N hydrochloric acid, and more or less fumigated. With direction from an ad hoc committee of various teachers and administrators. And with pretty much everyone in the school stopping their own locker business to observe, since this took place at precisely 2:25 in the afternoon on a Friday. That was not a good year for the ol’ social life.
5. I am a very slow reader. There are a few reasons for this: 1) I have fallen asleep; 2) I am paying too much attention to whether the grammar is correct that I have either stopped reading entirely or have been merely skimming over the past few pages paying more attention to the sentence structure and comma usage than to the actual content of the book and so must turn back several pages every page or so; and/or 3) I can barely read in the first place. I also have very poor memory about things I read, especially over the long term. I can barely remember what I’m supposed to be researching. Wait, where am I?
6. I have (some) gray hair, and I like it. Richard Gere, I’m coming for you.
7. I can sleep anywhere, anytimeaaasdffffffffffffffffffffffffhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh