I don’t think my source code was ever properly debugged — no one ever wrote in a halting condition for aborting an attempt to drink something if I should suddenly start talking.  In non-programming terms, what this means is that if my arm gets the signal that it’s time to take a drink, it reliably picks up whatever glass or mug I have in my hand and starts bringing it up, and sends it towards the current known location of my mouth at the time the command was issued.  Sadly there is no interrupt signal sent in the event that a thought suddenly enters my head that I have to share, or if I should turn my head to look at something, or even change the inclination of my head to look at something down on my desk.  So, rather than my hand merely stopping mid-transit, then resuming its action once my head is back in a proper position for drinking coffee/margaritas/gin, as you might expect A NORMAL PERSON TO DO, it keeps going, and once it gets to where it thinks my mouth ought to have been it just upends the cup and spills my drink all over my shirt and/or lap.

If this happens early in the morning (as it frequently does) I mumble one of my Favorite Words to Say Before 9 AM, like “Fuck” or “Goddamn’t” or “Meh.”  If this famous bug in my operating system should happen to occur in front of witnesses, which is more common when I’m out at happy hour, I’ll just go right to dabbing up the spilled liquid off my shirt with a napkin and explain, “Sorry ’bout that.  It’s part of my condition.”

While talking, if I find I can’t recall a word or the name of something, be it a movie or a restaurant or whatever, I will pause and make a weird noise.  A lot of the time it is a clucking noise I make with my tongue.  Other times it’s a low two-note whistle, which is often accompanied by a back and forth eye roll.  This usually does the trick and causes the thing I was trying to recollect to jump to the top of my mind.

My right leg is the one with all the trouble, and after sleeping through the night it manages to swell up a bit, and then refuses to wake up along with the rest of me.  For the first forty minutes or so after getting out of bed, I walk around the way that most of us imagine a zombie to walk: rather lopsided, dragging my right leg behind me.

When trying to solve a problem, it’s not too unusual for me to mumble to myself.  Sometimes this is accompanied by tugging on my right earlobe, which is also something I do when trying to remember what the hell it was I was supposed to pick up at the grocery store.

There is a certain point at which I have consumed enough alcohol that the dam just bursts  and I just start talking, leaping from topic to loosely connected topic, all of it incredibly ridiculous.  People tend to find it incredibly amusing when this happens.  If no one else is talking I will sometimes make up dialog for them and start speaking it, occasionally using a new voice I have just made up to indicate that these are actually your lines that I’m saying, but sometimes just moving my arms back and forth in a robot like fashion, which I seem to think is the universal sign for “This is actually someone other than myself drunkenly holding forth discourse on this subject.”

My furiously churning brain will sometimes bring up something particularly funny that I read or saw anywhere from a few days to a a few years before, and if it’s something particularly hilarious I will start laughing.  Obviously no one else is privy to the endlessly playing movie in my mind, so I imagine it just looks like I’m laughing at nothing.  I suppose that’s how crazy people must look.

What about you?  Anything especially odd that you do that can only be described as being part of your condition?