3501 Habits

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

One of the saddest things to happen was the optioning of morality by religion.

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This is SO useful! (From www.xkcd.com - go there. They're fun.)

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I've mentioned before that I don't form habits easily. I don't have a set sequence in the morning, for example, not even when I was working. Without habits and routines, we can easily forget important things. Like, sometimes before I leave the house, I have to feel my toothbrush to know whether I'd brushed my teeth yet. I have to keep careful notes as to whether bills have been paid, since I don't have a set time or routine for paying them.

Jay was very bound by habit. He'd actually get anxious if a set habitual routine was disrupted.

I do have a few habits:

• I always always turn off the stove burner before lifting a pot off the burner. It's such an ingrained habit that I don't even think about it when I do it.
• I often fall asleep with a pencil in my hand. When I wake up in the morning, the pencil will be tightly gripped in my fist. When I fell asleep, the pencil would have been in writing position, so at some point I had to have shifted it to a fist grip.
• I never lock any door - house, car, hotel room - with an empty hand. If I don't have something in that hand, I literally can't lock the door. What's supposed to be in the hand is of course the key, so I can't lock myself out, but occasionally it happens to be the WRONG key, or not even a key. Oops. I don't seem to have added "check that's it's a key, and the right key" to the habit.
• Because I don't seem to have routines, I depend on To Do lists. An unfortunate habit is that if there's something on that list of very high priority that I don't feel like doing, nothing else on the list gets done, either! I wish I could train me to do something else. I think I'm untrainable. Wild feral me.

Do you live by habits? Do you have any odd ones?
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