List Day: 5 Random Confessions

• Until I recently looked it up on Wikipedia, I thought that the "stick" in "carrot and the stick" was the stick from which the carrot was dangling. I didn't realize that there was another stick smacking the donkey from behind while it walked towards the carrot in front. So, any time a book or movie had a line like "There's the carrot, now where's the stick?" I was completely puzzled as to what the stick would do that the carrot wasn't already doing.


• Bullying is the latest teenage epidemic to gain some notoriety, but when I look back on my high school career, I cannot think of a single instance of bullying. I was never bullied, I never saw people bullied, and I never bullied anyone. Because of this, I probably don't appreciate the seriousness of bullying at all.
  
  This doesn't apply to middle school though -- everyone bullied everyone else in middle school because pre-teens are social monsters trying to survive.


• I start restaurant tipping at an estimate of 20% but then round the change down so the total bill is a multiple of 25 cents. I deduct for unusually awful service. If there is a dude sitting in the bathroom with towels and cologne, I refuse to accept anything from him and may even leave with wet washed hands so I don't have to tip him.


• After creating a grocery shopping list, I'll rewrite the entire thing in store order, so I can pick up items in the order that I encounter them in the store. I am a very efficient shopper.


• When I was growing up, my dad hated driving me anywhere, so he would always try to offload me in other peoples' carpools (OPCs) without offering to drive himself. By tenth grade, it started to strain relationships with my friends' parents, so I used my savings to take the DASH bus home every day from summer classes while telling my parents that I was still in the carpool.