Catholic Sensibility

Five Weird Habits

From Lee: Rules: “The first player of this game starts with the topic 'five weird habits of yourself,' and people who get tagged need to write an entry about their five weird habits as well as state this rule clearly. 1. When I floss, I always do my thirty spaces in counterclockwise order from upper right, except that I skip the second-last space which has a sharp edge that always tears the floss, saving it for the end. If the floss breaks, I just proceed to the shower. 2. I always lace my shoes in a consistent pattern; the left and right are always done in mirror image. 3. I hardly ever use dollar bills. When I get them in change, I usually give them to my wife. I spend $2 bills and dollar coins instead. The tellers at our local bank know me well for this habit. 4. When I pick up a bridge hand from a duplicate box at the club, instead of counting to make sure I have thirteen (like most every player), I slip the top and bottom cards off simultaneously. Repeating six times, I should have one card left. This does two things. Not only have I ensured I have the correct number of cards, but also I've shuffled the stack and won't be tempted to notice the order of cards as they've been placed by the previous player--which might give me a clue as to how the hand was played by that competitor. 5. Here's the weirdest. Every so often, I calculate my age in days. In my head. I check the number with division by seven to make sure I didn't miss a day somewhere. (I was born on a Friday, so I know that my age as of today will be a number divisible by seven with a remainder of four.) There's more. Then I factor the big number to see if any interesting smaller numbers come up. Today I'm 17, 182 days old. I check it by building up multiples of seven. (14000, 16800, 17150, etc., and I find that 17, 178 is divisible by 7. Add four days to get Tuesday.) An even number, but I also notice something more useful: the sum of the odd digits (1+1+2=4) differs from the sum of the even digits (7+8) by exactly eleven, giving me 1562*11. Look at this: the digits 1+6 = 5+2, another multiple of 11. Now I get 142*11*11, and that first number has two prime factors. My age can be expressed by the product of prime numbers: 71*11*11*2. I think I began this habit in earnest on the day I graduated from college. The Moody Blues had a song entitled "22,000 Days," and just for fun I was thinking about how old a person would be, and I noticed my mom was close to that age. So I calculated it out in days, and that very day, she was exactly 22,000 days old. Very weird. "In the end, you need to choose the next five people to be tagged and link to their web journals. Don’t forget to leave a comment in their blog or journal that says “You are tagged” (assuming they take comments) and tell them to read yours.” I hate this part. Feels like a chain letter. Okay, just to be different, I tag commenters Tony, Susan, Brigid, Liam, and Jimmy Mac instead of bloggers. If your lists are too long for the comment boxes, just e-mail me and I'll post them here by Thursday.