When I was in elementary school, someone told me that if you twist the stem off your apple, saying a letter of the alphabet with each turn, that it would break off with the initial of the man you were fated to marry. Naturally, this favored the people at the beginning and middle of the alphabet and was a fickle predictor.
So why, now that I’m happily married, did I just catch myself counting through the alphabet as I twisted the stem off my apple?
What weird habits do you have leftover from childhood?
I hold my breath going past cemeteries (or at least I think I really, really should) to keep from being haunted.
Holding my breath as I go through a tunnel, not to keep anything from happening or to cause anything to happen, but just to see if I can do it.
My mom always used to swerve the car through parking lots to run over tin cans or pinecones or empty cups that were discarded. We would wait with baited breath to hear the “crunch” or squish” of the items she was trying to hit…sometimes she would even swing around a second time with us kids chanting in the back seat to cheer her on if she missed it on the first pass. I still find delight in doing the same thing, or crunching through the leaves in fall, stepping on frozen mud puddles, etc. etc. etc. My husband…not so much. I get a lot of rolling eyes, especially when I miss and swing back around for take 2. Ahh, youth.
beth
I still tend to avoid cracks in the sidewalks, “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.”
Who came up with that one, anyway?! and then I feel a little guilty if I do forget and step on them. It’s just nicer to avoid them, Just In Case.
I also remembered that if I get an individual size carton of milk or juice that I’ll shake it. I picked this habit up in elementary school because the milk was often frozen at lunch and I needed to break up the ice chunks.
For a long time I would not look squirrels in the eyes due to the fact that Greg Castell said they had laser eyes which could kill me. Or was it radar eyes? At any rate, squirrels found me shy and skittish. Imagine…
I would lift my legs when going over a railroad crossing in a car, as Erik Wollmar said it was bad luck. Maybe it was an old Swede thing from his father, as we also held our breath in front of cemetaries so that ghosts didn’t enter out bodies through our breathing.
Other than that, I am habit free.
I always put my left shoe on before my right, my left hockey skate on before my right, etc. I don’t know the origin of this habit, but I have been doing it for as long as I can remember.