From a Spiral Notebook: Quirks

Hi all,

First, I can’t help but mention the zoom book launch that happened on January 22nd for Big Sky Falling. It was so nice to see people and talk about the book, and Lorna Crozier was of course amazing and generous. She could make a rock look good by asking it her special brand of careful, thoughtful, kind questions and encouraging it to talk about itself. Thank you so much to all of you who came. If you’re interested there’s a recording here.

Picture of an amaryllis, which has nothing to do with the newsletter but is pretty,

Now on to my usual meanderings: Do you have any quirks (by which I mean Merriam-Webster’s second definition of a peculiar trait or idiosyncrasy)?

My sister Kat mixes the peanut butter with the jam on top of her toast with her knife before spreading it, then spreads evenly to all corners, exactly the same thickness everywhere.

When we use the placemats with suns and moons, my mum places her water glass exactly in the centre of one of the line of moons (the base of the glass is precisely the same diameter). When her plate has been taken away, she moves the glass from moon to moon, always exactly on top.

My brother sings to himself under his breath, some kind of classical I believe, but with no sound. The words he sings are la la la, and all you can hear is a bit of breath against flapping tongue.

To be a good quirk, it must be something a person does not know they do (or does not know is odd). I asked my mum and sister what quirks I have. Apparently I sit in the same place all the time. I have to sit in “my” place at the dinner table, and only sit at two other places in the whole upstairs of the house: one particular end of the couch, or my desk chair to write. I will sit somewhere else, but only if someone is in “my” spot. This is true. I also hate in self-help or therapy groups, the kind with a circle of chairs, when the leader tries to shake things up by making people sit in a different chair. I do it, but I hate it.

It is perhaps the things we do without knowing we are doing them that tell others the most about ourselves. I’m not sure what these things tell us about each other (I’m territorial? Stuck in my ways? That’s not quite it). Perhaps just that we are human. Perhaps that is the most important thing we can learn about anyone.

Fun project/homework: ask someone you love about your quirks. Share if you dare.

FROM THE SPIRAL NOTEBOOK

Here is a little piece which has no title. It may be the start of a story, but I haven’t figured out what happens next yet.

Point of interest: when I read this to my mother, she objected to the verb “intuit”, claiming it was an example of a noun turned into a verb. One of her quirks is that she dislikes this (“you dislike verbifying?” I asked. She grimaced and walked away). I have looked it up—a quirk, or perhaps just an annoying attribute, of our family is that we have to look things up. This is closely related to our having to be right—and the word was first used in 1855, so I figure it’s okay.

Untitled

She is trying to put an Ikea shelf together. There are no instructions anymore, just pictures, and she misses the words. This cartoon Swede is manipulating the wooden shelf in some way – she can tell by the picture – but is he turning it upside down or somehow inside out? And why does she not seem to have the inside out piece? She tilts her head to the side, trying to see the flat picture from another dimension, but she is stuck with just the two.

She puts down the picture and looks at the pieces, laid out like disarticulated bones around her, at the little black screws. Somehow this will turn into a shelf, if she can figure out the next step, the inside out step, and put the shelves between the upright pieces of wood. Perhaps if she just looks at the pieces she can intuit how they go together, like archeologists with dinosaur bones. Maybe archeologists have been doing it wrong all this time, it occurs to her to think. How would they know? Maybe dinosaurs really look like shelves.

NOTES

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Yours,
Kelsey
kelseyandrews.ca