Quirkiness

Let's face it — how can a person describe his/her quirky traits or behavior?
The thing is that what I find quirky can seem completely normal to someone else, right?
Or, my quirkiness might seem a bit strange, not in the most positive way.

So what does even “quirky” mean? one of the many definitions is — “something that is strange/not normal but cool.”

My list must be odd, that’s for sure, please note that there is no specific order:

1. Books / Wet grass /Perfumes/Detergents /Gasoline scents.

It had all started when I was a young girl, That’s when I’d begun to get intoxicated with smells — of all kinds.

The smell always had some kind of consoling connotation or a reference to an important person in my life.

I remember liking the smell of cars’ gasoline, I could just smell it until it had made me feel nauseated.

There’s no particular reason for it, maybe it was due to my father’s deep love for cars, and that’s how my mind connected the dots?
My mind made me love something that can remind me of my father’s interests and passion.

As a kid I loved nature. 
Whenever we went to visit relatives in the countryside, I felt like I was inside a fairy tale.
That’s probably why I’d begun liking the smell of grass — mostly after rain — as it felt like a new fresh beginning to me — made me all excited.

When we immigrated to a new country, just my parents and I,
It was not a rare sight to see me left alone for several hours at a time.

I was brave and tried to tell myself stories while watching the cartoon characters in front of me making funny faces or talking to each other.

That’s when I’d started to love my mom’s perfume scent. I could smell her smell from afar, it made me feel safe as if she were with me.

When I had become older and got accustomed to a new language and my surroundings, I would go on walks around my neighborhood.

I would sense different smells around me, the main one was the laundry’s detergent.

There was a particular detergent smell that brought me back to my hometown, to my grandmother’s house with her small vegetable garden behind her building.

The memory didn’t make me cry — my heart ached, but it ached with excitement.
I felt grateful to be reminded of the place I once called home.

Now, it is making me teary while remembering it.

Some smells are good, they have a nostalgic mystic power to connect you, for a brief moment, to a place that is so distant and out of reach.

With time, I’d started to feel unbearable loneliness and couldn’t even portray the feeling in simple words.

Books became my friends, lovers, and family. They made me feel at peace like I had belonged.
That’s why books’ pages scent make my heart cringe — to this day.

2. Korean tv shows/ Kpop/ Korean culture.

I really love and adore Korean people and culture, but why?
I can’t even start explaining, I have a whole post about it, and I’m still not even close to finishing explaining it.

I find that Koreans are very expressive, and know how to speak their mind.
Their tv shows’ scripts portray our daily mishaps and agony.

When I travel abroad, for some reason, I feel safer when I recognize Korean people nearby. I feel like can trust them.

You might find it funny, but sometimes I have this notion that in one of my previous lives, I was born as a Korean.

Currently, I try to learn Korean — at least the basics, and I listen to Korean music on the daily basis.

3. Tea Lover.

It’s funny, as a kid I hated tea, couldn’t even drink it.
However, it had changed in my 20’s.

I had begun drinking tea again when I was sick, I had tea with milk and honey — it had done its wonders!
I’ve continued drinking it — I can drink more than 3 cups a day.

4. I cry all the time — mostly when I’m super angry/stressed/taken for granted.

The past year had been quite hard at my old job, the one had quit.
One of the reasons for it: I was having many arguments with my clients over the phone.

There were 2 different clients that I remember that had raised their voice at me while speaking and blamed me for every possible issue in the world.

I remember how I’d started crying.
At first, it was a brief cry, a silent one, I was trying poorly to hide it while talking the phone.

Once the phone call had ended, I ran to the ladies room and cried buckets behind a closed door.

5. I’m a weird combination of INFP/INFJ and An Empath.

I find it very hard being around people that suffer a great deal of pain or just ache for whatever reason. I tend to consider others’ pain as my own.

That’s why I find it hard to be friends with people who go through a rough patch in life, as I can’t find the resources to handle their pain.

6. I don’t like owning the latest phone/gadget.

I really like technology, and I’d always considered myself as an early-adopter — But how could I be one?

I’ve never really bought all the new products that came on the market.

My first ever smartphone was purchased by the end of 2015. 
I was like a dinosaur among my peers.

I went and studied technology when I had no smartphone, I couldn’t even design a user interface for smartphone applications — as I had never used one.

7. I become super quite when I’m sulky.

Something that I’ve noticed doing the past few years.
When I get irritated I just become very quiet and stop saying my opinions on any matter brought up.
It’s kind of childish, but I had not yet found a way to change it.

8. I’d met one of my best friends online and never had actually met her in person.

When I was around 13 years old, I was a fan of Hilary Duff, Amanda Bynes, and the Olsen twins.

I found a forum ( it was a thing once!) with people around my age that liked the same celebs as me, and that’s how we connected.

We started learning how to make graphics and made “Avatars” and “Signatures” with our idols pictures.

We talked openly about their shows, movies, and music. It was a safe place, where we could speak our minds freely.

We had Kat and Chrystal- the administrators that watched our language and behavior, they felt like older sisters to me.

Kat was from New Zealand and Chrystal was from Canada, and it was amazing to me that I could talk to them, I might have taken that for granted at that time.

That’s when and where I’d met Darleen.

She was younger than me, and I had always felt overprotective, I felt like the older sister.

We started talking on MSN messenger and then on Facebook, we constantly switched the platform for conversation — while adapting to the constant change of technology.

We had never met, but we had always felt close.

9. I can’t write in my mother tongue language.

It’s funny, but my mother tongue language is the one I know the least.

I have recently tried to improve my CV and had let my father read it.
He was dazzled by my language knowledge description. 

My third learned language had become my native language.

10. I tend to read out loud.

Throughout the years I found it harder and harder to concentrate while reading. I could have read an entire page and hadn’t recalled at all what it was about. 

Sometimes, it is easier to read out loud, as both of my senses working — the hearing and sight sense — together creating an image for me to remember.

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Thanks a lot for taking the time to read 10 quirky things about me. Hope I made you think about your own quirks — share them with your friends, they might have known about them already or might have not :)

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