I've been double-tagged on the weird habits meme--thanks Maggie and Ling!--so it's finally time to get off my butt and do it. (Although, as I'm running so godawful late on it, I think I'm not going to bother with posting the rules and tagging others...at this point, I think everybody knows the rules, and just about everybody else has already done it!)

5 Weird Habits:

1. When I get tense (if I'm alone and out of most people's hearing), I get rid of the stress by vocalizing...I mean, major vocalizing. I'd like to think of this as a left-over from choir all those many many years ago...but really, just about anything that works to let out stress, I'll try, no matter how strange it might appear to outside eyes!

2. My breakfast preparations have expanded into a twenty-minute-long ritual that I do every morning before work, waking up early to get it done: grind fresh espresso beans, make my latte, and then try for one of my most trivial Major Life Goals: to figure out how to draw cool shapes with the milk foam as I pour it onto the coffee in the end. (The baristas at The Boston Tea Party always draw beautiful detailed leaves on top of their lattes, with the ends of the milk foam. I'm starting with hearts, as the easiest shape, but I hope to work up to leaves someday. For now, the hearts only work about 50% of the time...and only with some squinting and helpful imagination!)

3. I talk to myself. Sigh.

4. If I don't write every day, I get really, really crabby.

5. I hum a lot, but I don't hum songs. Instead,it's usually obscure horn parts from big symphonies (what the horns are playing underneath the interesting violin work that the audience is listening to), or else fragments from horn sonatas that I memorized when I was a teenager. That's the music that seems to have gotten permanently embedded into my subconscious.

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Sorry it took so long to follow up on the tag. I've continued to just feel awfully tired this week, as well as being blocked on the writing, which (see no. 4!) put me into a week-long foul mood. Luckily, with lots of support from Patrick (and lovely mellow rose tea, also made by Patrick), I managed to write over 1,000 words of Congress of Shadows yesterday, which made me feel a whole lot better. I'm still in that mood of The Sucks, as SarahP would say...but I'm trying to keep writing despite all the insecurities and worries that keep rearing up their nasty little hydra heads to get in my way.