Call me a weirdo!

Now blogging is the last thing I should be doing at this time of the year, but a tag about unleashing the quirky “me” was too good an oppurtunity to resist. So after some hard thinking, I have zeroed onto the “five” weirdest things that even I can’t completely believe are a part of me. Enjoy!

1. Kill-Joy

Nicknamed by every imaginable teacher as a “well-behaved, cultured” student, my 16 years at school saw me through 2 big fights (abnormal I know, but that’s me), but both of them are just too unexpectedly gory (than violent). You can decide which one is more horrible–

a) The one in first standard: A normal argument in the lunch hour with a boy sitting next to me turned into a I’ll-throw-your-bag-if-you-touch-mine challenge. Which led onto me touching his bag. And him throwing mine on the floor. And then I threw his bag in a fit of rage. And while he was picking his books, I actually remember kicking them. Which understandably made him furious and he ran to my side of the floor (where my bag’s contents were still spilled), picked one of my books at random and started tearing a few pages. And this is the worst part–I still can’t believe I did this–but I remember pulling his head upright with both my hands locked into his hair. In fact I pulled so hard that not only did I pull a good bunch of hair but a piece of scalp as well. Although the precise details are fuzzy, I remember the sudden shell-shocked look on the uptil-then chattering class mates. The guy whose head I managed to rip was bleeding profusely and I remember getting busy with pleading to the class fellows around me to pretend as if nothing’s happened (yes, even back then covering my tracks was more important than someone’s life LOL). But two girls had already reported it and I was summoned to the head mistress’ office and a reasonable amount of hell ensued at home as well. I still find the incident weird as it happened when I was all of 6. Maybe I was quite unaware of my strength back then. Although I do vaguely remember getting suprised by the result of my pulling, the fact that I resorted to such an insane way to bring down a person was quite bizarre.

b) A sequel of sorts that occurred seven years later when I again got into an argument with a boy sitting next to me. But this time it started with us suddenly defending our respective territory on-desk with outstretched hands. An accidental breach by the partner led me to poke him lightly on the back of his hand with my Reynolds pen. But guess he just wasn’t in a good mood and he poked me back rather violently. I got hurt a little (the pinprick puncture had started to bleed) which angered me so much that right then I opened my geometry box, took a compass out and literally stabbed the guy at the back of his hand. Don’t ask me if it came through the other side or not, but somehow it didn’t bleed that much and we started punching and kicking each other. All the class made a circle around us as us two otherwise-saintly students locked horns. I don’t know how long it went for but what I do remember is going back to my desk, wiping the blood off my compass and desk and sitting through the day as if nothing had happened. That qualifies for weird. Moral of the story– I can tear, puncture and peel flesh off people without batting an eyelid. So getting into medicine wasn’t exactly the decision of my head (wink wink)

2. Run for cover

Previews, back cover blurbs, cover photography, titles–Things that I am sure connoisseurs of cinema and books wouldn’t care a damn about, but are the very things that decide what I am going to watch and read next. In fact over the years, I have noticed that my most cherished films and fiction also sport the covers and titles I absolutely fell for at the first sight. Plus, I have found that I can see through even the most manipulatively crafted previews to make out whether its a movie I’ll enjoy or not. And 9 out of 10 times it works. Which is rather weird.

3. Even or Odd?

Given that guys generally are more autistic, it isn’t any surprise that one of my favourite passtimes while sitting everyday in the loo is counting song lyrics to find out if every line or couplet has the same number of words. Yea, its the most braindead things one can do, and there’s absolutely no sense to it. But I have been enjoying it without fail since as far back as I can remember. There are even weirder things I do on random days to keep myself busy while walking–like estimating how many steps it would take me from station to uni and then counting them as I walk, or calculating the number of seconds its been since an event happened. And there even was a time when I had come to believe that *adult alert* j*cking off odd number of times led on to a crappy day (and vice versa).

4. Eight-o-phobia

Now this is what happens when you read Cheiro’s book of numerology when you are all of 9. The legendary astrologer always dropped not-so-subtle hints about how unlucky dates coming to number 8 can be. Or how doomed and/or unreliable people born on these dates/years really are. Coincidence in the following years meant that bad things tended to happen on these very dates (or probably it was just me expecting/interpreting them) until last year when my life did me one better and believe it or not, some of the most crucial days, exams, results, goodbyes, admission numbers, bank passcodes–all added up to number 8. Has this led me to drop my superstition? No way. I hated Fanaa which released on the 26th of May LOL. As you can see, the damage being done here is far deeper.

5. The (un)usual suspects

Yes, quite like everyone else (more like Suyog who tagged me), I have gorged on chalk, raw coriander; hate to read old, yellowed books written in beady times new roman-esque fonts; and as a child I even have, to my credit, getting a newly built greenhouse down of a neighbour by pelting stones (the reason–mom was emptying a decorative fountain and wanted to get rid of a few of them and I was too lazy to go down one floor in the blazing heat of summer afternoon. So I just flung them in the air and every one of them shattered the neighbour’s decidedly big all-glass conservatory. Yes, I could hear something breaking my side of the wall but that didn’t stop me of throwing. Thankfully, they weren’t home and they even set up a neighbourhood enquiry to find the culprit, but as I had grabbed those stones from the porch of a house just three houses down the lane, the battle ensued between the wrong parties. I confessed on having done that many years later when we moved to London, and no matter how disgusted my parents were, they still didn’t mind laughing it off.)

Phew… turns out I am weirder than I thought. Oh well… thanks a ton Suyo (yes, why I sometimes call you that and not Suyog is again weird!) for tagging me.