The things people do
When I walk on tiled floors, I can't let my left foot step on more cracks than my right, or my world is thrown off balance, and I'll feel a terrible urge to walk at a 45 degree angle towards the neglected side. Also, I'll venture to say that my mother probably has a pretty good chiropracter.
He's so strange, he once wrote a poem about the conversationalistic qualities of his left foot, and piled the names of colours up in a big scribbled heap on the right-hand-side of a page because he doesn't write on the left side, and says things like "yawn a more roman way" because he thinks everyone knows what palindromes are. Why isn't "palindrome" a palindrome? Anyway, when someone like that says something like this to you:
...Yes...right....
you can take profound satisfaction in saying that you out-stranged him. I out-stranged him today, and it was satisfactory.
Deducing personalities from handwriting seems like a conman's claim to a proper job (a little like astrologers, and management consultants), but today someone looked at my writing and told me that, with a few flowery bits, yes, I fit into a category. Copybook galland, and all the bits that come with it. Plus, I'm neurotic.
And, I have a reticent g.
What a marvellous way to introduce myself at parties. "Hello, I'm Rachel, and I have a reticent g". Stand back and brave the onslaught of stares.
It's a little distressing, I think, every time you discover that as individual as you'd like to think you are, there's still a category out there for you. Even a category labelled "category-less" is still a category. And everything's out to put me in a box; everything from astrology and school to biologists and job descriptions.
Today, go to a party, and say: "Hi, I'm a capricorn, and now you know everything about me."
It's hard to be to-the-point when I don't, you know, have one.