Five Degrees of Weirdness

Manda flung down the tag gauntlet leaving me with little choice but to expose my more reclusive side to the world. So without fanfare here are my five degrees of weirdness.

1st Degree: I am not a people person. I know that is surprising coming from someone who has social anxiety but it is true. Trust me. For most of my life I have found that more often than not time spent alone or lost in a good book is preferable to time spent with the majority of humanity. Present company excluded of course.

2nd Degree: I cannot read a newspaper that someone else has read first. Not sure when I picked up this habit or why but a paper must be in pristine condition when I get to it or the reading of said paper loses the enjoyment factor. Even weirder is that this only applies to newspapers. I am a regular at the local used book store and I have no problem reading old magazines while waiting at a doctors office.

3rd Degree: I write my best poetry or stories when I am sad, stressed, angry or depressed. Give me dark clouds, floods, earthquakes, tornados and my pen never stops. Fill my world with sunshine, rainbows, birds singing, children laughing and I might as well use my pen as a toothpick for all the writing I will be doing.

4th Degree: I have never had many male friends in my life. One or two scattered about the years. While platonic girl friends have been around since I was a little guy. Not sure why this is. Maybe the whole jock mentality a lot of guys have. Maybe the whole locker room humor thing. Maybe because my mother has always been one of my best friends besides being the worlds top mom. Of course this also has posed a great deal of problems for romance in my life. Most women I have known do not handle male/female friendship well, not well at all.

5th Degree: I have always felt a bit left out of the whole religion lifestyle. Friends and relations talk about mass or services as if they have had a personal meeting with God. I on the other hand have always fought to stay awake and gagged on all of the hypocrisy. One on one I experiance God on many levels. Within organized religion though he is a mystery to me. I crave that social inneraction with fellow believers yet the spiritual path I have traveled to date has been one of solitary meditation where fellow travelers have been few and far between.