I was once in love with a man who exclaimed that I was quirky. Like most of his statements, his tone was nearly impossible to decipher and, after he left me, I opted to think that he saw these quirks as flaws. So, I hid these away for a few years, terrified that these same quirks would drive away other loves that crossed my paths [instead of maybe admitting that he was just a cowardly, self-servicing, calculating man without the slightest clue how to connect with humans on an emotional level because he's too busy trying to fling everything into a logical, scientific forum... No, I'm not bitter.] When I met my husband, I was petrified that my dark past, in addition to my plethora of seemingly harmless quirks, would inevitably drive him away. They didn’t. (When I tried dumping all my flaws and quirks and neuroses into his lap to try to sabotage things, he finally looked right at me and calmly stated, “You’re not going to scare me off if that’s what you’re trying to do.” This is among the higher numbers in the Top 20 Reasons I Married Him list. He’s that good.)

Since we’ve been together, I’ve started recovering these quirks and exploring them, weeding through them and seeing which actually embody my tendencies and which are unhealthy habits I could do without. Here are three that I’ve recently rediscovered about myself that I’m hanging onto:

I love driving around and looking at Christmas lights… by myself…for hours.

This personal tradition started with my father, who would always take the time for a detour on the way home from anywhere during the holiday season to look at Christmas lights. My mother never allowed any outstanding Christmas decorations and limited our household holiday decor to a tree, a wreath, and candles in the windows. Every time we passed a gaudy, overlit house, my dad would chuckle to himself and stare in childish wonder of every Griswoldian spectacle, the envy of such freedom sparkling cheerfully in his eyes. As I got older, he and I were the only ones who enjoyed driving around for hours as it seemed everyone else had someplace more important to be. Soon, we were having to schedule annual dates a week before Christmas for the exclusive purpose of looking at lights and then there were years where we never saw them together at all.

When I moved home in 2003, I found myself very very alone in my drunken insanity. I had successfully pushed all my family away from me and staring at Christmas lights seemed too intimate and a little too embarrassing to share with anyone else. For many many December evenings, I’d fill a Nalgene bottle with Bailey’s and ice, wrap up in a warm coat, find my Charlie Brown Christmas CD and take myself for a drive, often staying out for more than 3 hours, driving, smoking, singing, and crying into my chilled wassail at the beauty that surrounded me and the joy that seemed to elude me. It was dangerous and reckless and unbelievably pathetic and kinda insane in retrospect, but those nights were the highlight of that dark year. In years following this, I would sometimes “treat” myself to a night off the wagon, slowly perusing quiet neighborhoods and parking my car in front of the tackiest of houses to bask in the lights and try to immerse myself in whatever Christmas was. AGAIN, it was dangerous and reckless and unbelievably pathetic and kinda insane in retrospect, but those nights were the highlights of my darkest Decembers.*

In the time I’ve actively embraced sobriety (you know, without just telling everyone that’s what I was doing), I’ve found that I can contain my excitement for Christmas lights about as easily as I could for a surprise gift of a million bucks. I’m always grateful that sobriety has brought my family back emotionally, as they now ride with me enough to allow me to take indirect routes home to ogle the various electric expressions of holiday celebrators.

Say what you will about the ridiculous overcommercialization of Christmas and how a giant, inflatable Mickey Mouse-dressed-as-Santa has nothing to do with the “real meaning” or how computer-programmed twinkle lights are impairing society’s ability to focus on Our Lord Little Baby Jesus Christ. Nothing makes me feel more childlike than staring at the sparkling spectacles created by overzealous Christmas fans, beseeching passing cars to take a moment to crack a smile and remember joy in it’s most basic, ridiculous, aesthetic form.

Last year I took myself on my solitary drive to sing Christmas songs to the baby inside me and explain to her what this swelling joy was in the atmosphere around her. This year I cannot wait to capture her reaction as she experiences it for herself.

*I don’t advocate drunk driving and I fully acknowledge that my doing so on so many occasions was extremely selfish and wrong. Even though I was never caught and never hurt anyone, it is still something I’m very ashamed to have done so willingly and frequently.

I have a problem with false nostalgia

The fact that I’m a Memory Lane junkie is no secret. I could sit around and reminisce everysingleday with those who inevitably haven’t thought about the past in years and years. In the advent of networking sites, this habit of mine has gone into overdrive in the last few years, seeing me delving into old relationships and old scenarios that simply don’t exist anymore. Gross. Anyway, I’ve curbed my need to indulge in memory so often on a public forum (even though “The inward eye is the bliss of solitude”, you know) but I think I’ve channelled that need for nostalgia to revisiting the past that I wasn’t a part of.

Heh?

I’ve always liked looking through old photos of my family during times that wasn’t around, which I don’t think is entirely unnatural. I love looking at my parents when they were younger and going through the drawers and boxes full of cluttered photographs at my Gran’s house to obtain clues about who my family were and eventually are. I kind of become manic about it, actually, taking time every other year or so to just peruse through forgotten photos and scrapbooks for an entire day and getting lost in memories and eras that I was never a part of.

This weird desire lives on a bigger level, too, in that I love watching old movies for their social commentary and the reality that Hollywood wanted us to embody and remember about this time. Additionally, I love reading about how people lived in their day-to-day lives in the past. It feels voyeuristic, but I love learning about people’s various quirks or the things that made them outstanding or boring. I love reading about what made Lucy and Desi Arnaz actual pioneers in both comedy and television even though their show seems so silly and trite to me today. I love trying to understand the mentalities of the average person during the most tumultuous times in history and how every one of society’s heroes had normal neuroses and quirks just like the rest of us. Like that Beethoven was apparently filthy and wouldn’t leave his room in the palace for weeks, covering the walls in scribbled music and covering his floors in rotting food and feces. (The royal administration would move him to a different studio each month to clean and air out the old one.) Or that Juliette Gordon Lowe dragged Rudyard Kipling out of a party she deemed as boring to go fishing in their formal wear.

A couple years ago, I came across an old 8mm projector and about 80 reels from a family that lived in Miami during the late 1950’s. I wanted to make a project of acquiring clues from the videos and eventually finding the family that would know those involved in the film, but this massive undertaking only lasted a few months before I became distracted by outside influences. However, while I still plan to eventually find the family eventually, I’ve found that I love watching these reels to peer into the past of a genuinely average mid-century American family. It’s amazing how they all look exactly like all the fake reels that cinema and television have recreated in the years since this era and I delight at watching women leave the house in pearls, dresses, hats and gloves and tinsel-covered Christmas mornings and burly men wearing short shorts and heavily-gelled hair while smoking a cigarette next to some infant. It’s fascinating and I hate that these videos contain no sound as I’d love to hear the dialogue and language of these people as well. This voyeuristic collection of mine is by far one of the most intriguing possessions I own.

I don’t know if I enjoy looking into the past for purely voyeuristic reasons or if I’m some sort of whacked-out history buff but, either way, this is a part of myself I hope doesn’t fade. I just wish there was some sort of career I had immediate access to that would allow me to explore this further. Like being a video librarian at a massive archive. Although I’m sure I’d sit in an editing room all day waiting to hear someone say something inappropriate or laughing when someone farted. This, I feel, is the humanity that unites us all.

I need to feel like I have enough.

This one doesn’t warrant an essay, but I’ve always felt like I can’t let things run low. I have to keep my possessions stocked at all times, I have to feel like there’s enough of something when I need it. I can’t let my gas gauge get less than a half-tank full without refilling it, I can’t let any makeup or bathroom products or food supply reach anywhere near scant proportions, I can’t let the laundry go without being done for over 4 days…

I think I have a problem with dealing with the tail-end of things. I always write in notebooks until there are a few pages left and then I abandon them, I never eat the last slice of bread or Lean Cuisine in the fridge, I can’t finish one tube of toothpaste unless there’s another already laid out.

Hunh… I’m weird.