One
Every day on my drive to work, as I turn onto Oglesby Road for the final half-mile stretch, I unlock my car doors. Sometimes I actually think to myself, “I need to unlock the doors so that people can reach me if I’m in a crash.” Mostly though, I do this without conscious thought.

1. It’s very unlikely that I’ll ever crash on this half-mile stretch of straight, low-speed country road, the single piece of road that I am most familiar with (having spent my entire life traveling over it).
2. It’s even more unlikely that any crash on this stretch would incapacitate me, or require people to open the doors from the outside.
3. I don’t do this at any other time. Ever. Yet I do it every day.
4. I think the auto-locking car doors are stupid. They’re a nuisance and not a convenience. I have no idea when this became a standard feature or why. But have I ever searched how to de-activate the option? No.

Two
Every time I get milk from the fridge, I sniff the container before pouring. I don’t always check the date, but I always sniff the container.

1. Though I have had sour milk in the past — and have even had sour milk from an unexpired container — this has only happened a couple times in my entire life.
2. Lately I’ve begun buying the ultra-pasteurized milk, the stuff that lasts for six weeks or more. I usually finish a carton nearly a month before the expiration date. I still sniff the container every time.
3. I don’t sniff ice cream or any other dairy product. Only milk.
4. I sniff all milk containers I use, even those in other people’s homes.

Three
I sniff books, too, but not because I think they’re going to go bad.

1. The first thing I do when I get a book, or when I pick one up in a store, or at a friend’s house, is to sniff it.
2. I’ve always sniffed books (and magazines). I can’t remember a time that I didn’t.
3. I put my nose against the pages and fan them, getting a good whiff of the paper, the ink, the cover, the binding.
4. I have an unwritten, unordered classification for types of smells. If I wanted to, I could write down an entire taxonomy of book smells. There are general categories, of course — musty, smoky, newsprinty, new-y, etc. — but there are also minute gradations — like a late-seventies Harvey comic, like a Del Rey sci-fi paperback, like a grade school library book, like a European food magazine.
5. I’ll frequently smell a book and think something like “Aha! This book smells very similar to that book on dirigibles that I smelled at that thrift store we went to with Jenn in 2002.” Seriously.

Four
I am addicted to the internet.

1. My e-mail program polls for new messages every sixty seconds. Sometimes I check manually between automatic checks.
2. I check my friends’ weblogs many times each day.
3. When I post something on the comic book forums, or on AskMetafilter, or anywhere else, I check for responses over and over and over again, sometimes for days after the post.
4. I cannot allow myself to use an RSS reader because when I do, I subscribe to dozens of feeds. I check them each morning, and then I refresh constantly, craving the next hit, the next news story, the next new link. RSS readers kill me, make me permanently attached to my internet connection.
5. I write twice as many weblog entries as I actually post. I have scores of fragments saved to my hard drive. I want to post them all, but generally forget about an entry if I don’t finish it when it’s started.
6. I own seven domains. Each domain (but the latest) has a web site, though not all of the sites are fully functional or especially useful.

Odds and ends: I am pathologically incapable of following the “clean as you go” program; I “mess as you go” and then clean in bursts. I bathe every day, sometimes twice a day, somtimes three times a day, but I rarely shower. I loathe shaving, and would be wild and hairy if Kris would let me. I cannot help but make smart-ass remarks, even though I know it’s a learned behavior I picked up from my father, a behavior I disliked in him. I love to sort things, and always have: alphabetizing books, organizing the cooking spices, sorting a box of baseball cards, ordering a directory of mp3s. I seem compelled to not put fuel in vehicles until the last possible moment. At home, I drink very little water, but in restaurants I go through the stuff like it’s nothing, consuming a liter or more at each meal.