Well?

I love my Mom.  She’s extremely important to me and has played a huge role in my life, not just raising me but inspiring me as well.  Sometimes she can be a bit of a scatter brain despite her intelligence.  Her driving scares the crap out me.  But I still love her.

When my mom is just puttering around, say, standing in the kitchen and thinking, it’s like she’s off in her own world.  And then she says, “Well?”  To no one in particular.  My brother and I always ask her, “Well…what…?”  And she never has an answer for it.  In fact, she’ll look at us like we’re the crazy ones.  She doesn’t even realize she says it!

Which got me thinking…we all have these little subconscious habits that we could never notice unless someone pointed them out to us.  Tapping our feet, fidgeting in our chair, playing with pens, twirling our hair, picking our nose, etc.  Ew to that last one.  But it’s true.  I don’t know what my habit is.  Someone would have to point it out to me.  I have a friend who, whenever he gets into a sticky situation, will tap his foot like crazy.  That’s a dead giveaway that he’s doing some serious thinking.  And he’s not happy about it.

Another example, people who draw with their tongue sticking out.  Or people who play sports with their tongue sticking out.  It’s actually very common.  Apparently my uncle played basketball with his tongue sticking out and then bit the end off when he came down from a jump and his jaw snapped shut.  Don’t know if it’s true or not.  My brother would stick his tongue out when he did a trick bike riding.  Every action shot of him doing a trick showed his tongue sticking out like a lizard.

Some people pick the hairs out of their head and examine them.  It’s a disease.  And kind of gross.  A girl in high school used to do it.  Poor girl got made fun of forever.  Actually, I think the disease included eating the hair afterwards.  A fast search concluded its called trichotillomania, pronounced trick-o-till-o-mania.  I also learned it’s very common and that the sufferers will pull their hair out when they encounter stressful situations.  Yeesh.