Cat Fight In The Kitchen-Wattpad Rant

Weird Personal Rituals

The other day I checked into the emergency room (it’s a long, boring story), and somehow, the last name on my fancy little ID bracelet was my best friend’s instead of my own. So for a while, I was Addy T instead of Addy C.

It was fun for a little while, I guess. Not really, because I was kind of seriously out of it.  

But when I was feeling better the next morning and the nurse finally noticed my bracelet had his last name as my own she looked at me very seriously and said “we ship you guys hard” and just left.

She’s an older lady and I barely know what shipping is, so that definitely surprised me.

That’s my dumb story. There you go.

Anyway, I wanted to talk about something kind of cool that we might visit later, because I think it’ll be fun. So let’s talk about: Weird Personal Rituals

I see so many characters that say “I’m weird” or “I’m random”, but I never actually see them doing anything weird or random. In fact, the ones that say it are usually the really conformist ones that fit into the “Mary Sue” category.

But I love when people do things that are weird. And I love it when they have a reason for doing it.

Think about it. We all want unique characters and how do we do that? We can’t just outwardly shun all clichés. That’s impossible. But we can start changing the little things. Start by giving your character a weird personal rituals that is reoccurring.

It’s kind of really fun.

So let’s do what I love to do and give real life examples!

Let me think…

Okay, so you all already know that I touch the knuckle of my index finger to my nose when I’m nervous, but I guess I do other weird stuff.

My brother and I both have the same personal ritual that’s kind of hard to explain. If we turn 180 degrees to the left, when we turn back around we have to go to the right. We cannot complete the circle or we feel all twisted and wrong. I don’t know if that made sense, but it’s what we do.

And I always have to have the volume of anything (television, radio, everything) set to an even number. I have to, because I hate odd numbers, because I’m boring and I like everything to be even. You can’t divide odd numbers by two and that really annoys me.

I also always have to wear a ring that my mom gave me when I was little and my class ring from high school every single day. In fact, I never take them off. And when I have conversations with people, I have to twist them around on my finger. I do it, because they’re tokens of who I am and where I’ve been and if I don’t have them I literally cannot function. I feel lost and I can’t concentrate and it’s just awful.

Oh! And I also have to imitate everything. I do. It’s bad. Anytime a new sound is introduced into my atmosphere I have to imitate it. (And I’ve done it my whole life, so I can do very, very convincing imitations of microwaves, phones, dogs, cats, cars, lots and lots of people). It’s to the point where I don’t realize I do it and people have to tell me to stop. You have no idea how many times I’ve been really embarrassed by it.