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AskMe: How to become an eccentric (or just look like one)

Suggest eccentricities for me to adopt | Ask MetaFilter

From a fun AskMe thread:

In my quest to become more distinctive, I'm looking for suggestions of harmless eccentricities to adopt. Who better than the MeFi hive mind to provide them? Anecdotes of eccentric folk you've known in the past welcome.

This reminds me of that stage where teenage girls randomly start to affect a terrible british accent, or when college freshmen suddenly stop wearing shoes and take up raw foods and the shakuhachi. Of course, this is not to say that I haven't had ideas of my own.

’Fess up: what was your goofiest affectation and what made you stop it?

Clarification (2006-07-15 10:20:20): The "In my quest..." portion above is a quotation from the link that is referenced; it's not actually me asking for help to (God forbid) become more eccentric. This confused some people, and, well, I regret your confusion if you have any and hope this clarification helps. -- The Management

Tom's picture

Probably the stupidest affectation that...

Probably the stupidest affectation that I've ever had was smoking little cigars in college. I didn't particularly like them and got no noticeable nicotine buzz, but I thought that they made me look cool. It seems particularly stupid now because I recently acquired a small white growth on my tongue. It hasn't grown larger, and my doctor assures me that it's probably just a hypertrophied taste bud, but still... I'm having it clipped off on Monday and analyzed.

Clothing: I wore a long scarf for a brief time in high school, indoors, in warm weather. My freshman year in college, I wore a bandana wrapped around my left wrist because I had a poster of Joan Jett wearing one and I had a mad crush on her. I found out later that some people assumed that I was hiding suicide attempt scars. I wear black or dark underwear and socks almost exclusively, and black or dark clothing most of the time that I'm not at work. This is actually quite practical, because some weeks I can get by with doing one load of laundry for the entire week.

Greetings: I used to answer the phone with a variety of greetings: "Spacely Sprockets" "National Security Agency, this call is being taped and traced, how may I help you?" "Ya-tah-hey!" "What ho!" (stopped when "ho" became part of the common parlance) Lately, my standard IM greeting is "What transpires?"

 
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