On abnormality by Mollie B. '06

I was reading back over the last two entries and realized I may have made myself sound somewhat normal, as people go (other than saying that biology research is one of the loves of my life). So I decided to devote this entry to a small subset of the ways in which I am either unique (if you’re my mother) or weird (if you’re the rest of the general public).

First and definitely foremost. I like to make lists. And spreadsheets. And graphs. If it can be made into an Excel spreadsheet, I have not only made it into an Excel spreadsheet, I have also converted it to Adobe PDF and stored it in my Athena locker.

One of my more notorious quirks is that I keep my sleep statistics in a set of Excel files. Every morning when I wake up, I record the time I fell asleep and the time I woke up, as well as the times of any naps I may have taken; every few weeks, I add that data to the statistics file, where I analyze it by type of day (schoolday, non-schoolday, or workday) and by year (freshman, sophomore, junior). It will probably not shock you to hear that, after much detailed statistical analysis, I discovered that I sleep more on the weekends than I do on schooldays.

My Athena locker also contains my schedule for this past spring term. I need to keep this in easily accessible form because I am extremely absentminded and occasionally forget which day of the week it is.

I was always like this as a child, although MIT has exacerbated my tendencies to record and graph random bits of information about my life. When I was little, I used to always get a 96-box of Crayola crayons for the first day of school (you know, the ones that came with the crayon sharpener in the back?)… and then I would carefully organize them so they were in rainbow order, with all the reds in one box, the oranges next to them…

I suppose the weirdest and most anal thing of all is that I have compiled all of my oddities into a single webpage. (It’s kind of like a hall of mirrors — it’s odd that I record all of my oddities about recording things…)

I’m sure I’ve freaked everyone out enough for one day, so I’ll stop there. ;)