I eat the insides last

Over the past year or so, a lot of semi-OCD patterns in my life have become very noticeable.


I am not sure when it started, but I have developed a number of peculiarities in my eating habit that really are, I think, a bit odd.

For example...


When I make a peanut butter (crunchy) and jelly (anything other than grape) sandwich, I first spread on the pb. After I am done, I wipe the excess pb on my other slice of bread, THEN do the jelly. This does have a purpose - no pb in the jelly jar.

Okay, so that one is pretty understandable.

Another food habit that I have is that when I make spaghetti, I will usually take one strand of uncooked spaghetti and suck on it. Obviously you cannot cook it in your mouth, but you can make it pretty gooey. I then proceed to break small, roughly even pieces off of it, and use the spit-lubed starch to glue them together into a little fence. Yup.

I guess that one is not particularly a pattern... but I do it almost every time I make angelhair.

Oreos. Oreos I can only eat whole if I have a cup of milk. I will their dunk the whole thing or precisely half until its soggy, THEN eat it.

If I do not have milk, it get a bit stranger.

I will take off one cookie and eat it. I press it against the roof of my mouth until it collapses under the pressure and saliva, doing my best not to chew it. I HATE getting oreo stuck in my teeth.

After that, I will use my fingernail to pry loose the double stuf from the other cookie. If I manage to succeed, I will then eat the other cookie in the same manner. If I do not succeed, I will separate them as much as possible before finally eating the stuf.

If I DO manage to get all the stuf out... I will then either eat the whole thing by itself... OR, if I am eating many oreos at once (I have no problem sitting down with 7 or 8 of them for a snack, so its a wonder I am not 300 lbs), I will make a triple decker double stuf oreo. Yes, that is right folks.... three delicious layers of double stuf between two little tiny cookies. I will then eat that in bites and savor it the whole way down.


Other bizarre food rituals:

When I eat goldfish, I try to crack one laterally (head to tail) and then stick another goldfish inside of it, thereby making a "goldfish sandwich"... which is really the dumbest thing in the world. It is just two goldfish eaten together.

When I eat a normal sandwich (not pb and j) that is on regular bread (not a roll), I will eat around the entire outside crust and eat the inside middle part last. Though I do not ALWAYS do this, I usually do... and I always do at Arbys. I also do this with PopTarts. I break off the crusty part and eat the center last.



I think the oddest food ritual I have is with smarties.

First, I divide them up by color. Next, I stack them up by color and line them up in a row. The largest column on the right down to the smallest on the left. The white ones are always the last on the left, which I will get to in a moment.
I proceed to eat them one by one from the largest column. To eat them, I usually bite around the edges, then I eat the middle last. One the largest column becomes even with the second column, I eat one from the one on the right, then one from the next column so they stay even.
I do this until they are all gone.
THEN, I eat the white ones. Now, some people might say that smarties all taste the same, but I beg to differ. White smarties are the tastiest. Which, taken out of context, would sound really awful... but its true. I just think they taste the best, so I save ALL of them and eat them last.
I am also known to pick out ALL of the white ones from a few packs, if I am eating more than one pack at a time, and save them all until I am done the rest.







So there you have it, part of my special-ed-ness. I am quite possibly slightly OCD.

Yet, it is patterns that bring sense to life itself, so I do not think it is all so bad to have that many. In a crazy world, where would we be without ritual? :)