My Quirky Traits

I'm sure everyone has their own oddities, their own typical, strange habits. I definitely have mine. Some of them bug my family and friends endlessly. Some don't. But all of them contribute to the definition of the person that I am.

I love cutting my nails. I do it about once in two days. I have never been able to figure out why it's such an interesting (Is that the right word?) activity for me. My mom and my brother are constantly poking fun at me for this. A whole lot of people suspect that I bite my nails, because I cut them so short. A lot of them refuse to believe that I don't actually bite them.

I love it when my friends scold me. I generally need someone to tell me to stop being a stubborn idiot, especially when it comes to taking medication for some ailment or going to a doctor. There was the time when I broke my foot and refused to quit the gym until Rachita gave me a sound scolding. And just yesterday, I was struggling with a really bad cold and refusing to take any sort of pills that would give me some relief. I still refused to do that after being reprimanded by Ashish, but just being reprimanded felt so good for some strange reason.

And then, of course, there's the one oddity for which my brother and my dad and my friend Sumit and some other friends have bugged me any number of times. I cannot go without taking a bath twice a day. Summer or winter, rain or shine, I need my morning bath in order to wake up properly and my evening bath in order to sleep well. This is something that Sumit, in particular, finds really strange. There was this time when he told me he would lock me up in a house that had no facility for bathing. He promised me air conditioning so I wouldn't feel too hot. He promised he'd show me Vivek Oberoi's movies so my mind would be pleasantly occupied. This was back in the days when Saathiya had been recently released and I'd become a major fan of Vivek's. I told Sumit I wouldn't give up bathing for anything. I'd probably go crazy in a day's time if he ever actually executed this plan. For that eventuality, he had a backup plan. He'd never unlock me from there.

And then there's this weird habit that my friends from school are a little too familiar with. I so totally enjoy correcting people's grammar and spelling. There was this time when I used to respond to Sumit's e-mail with his original text quoted, and all spelling and grammatical errors corrected and highlighted. It terrified him enough to run a spelling and grammar check on the testimonial he wrote for me, before posting it on orkut. This one's not really my fault, you know. I developed this habit because I spent way too much time on the editorial board of my school magazine. Now that it has been eight years since I left school, this has dampened a little but it still resurfaces from time to time.

There are possibly a number of other strange habits that I have that I cannot think of right now. But what I'm thinking right now is that, these are the sort of things that make life intriguing. I generally tend to like people who are a little weird, because they are more interesting. Not too weird, though. But I think we all do and should have some strange, unique traits that make us who we are. Life is more fun that way.