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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

TimK's picture

Okay since someone mentioned turtelnecks...

Okay since someone mentioned turtelnecks and someone else mentioned Germany - I worked for a government contractor on a military base in Germany back in 1998, and a coworker (American since we seem to have an internation discussion here) wore three-pieced suits every single day. Okay, so what? He was telecom tech who had to lift floor tiles and crawl around under them with the rest of us - in his 3 piece suit. Now what does this have to do with turtlenecks? He grew his own. His facial hair pattern and chest hair pattern joined, so he had a mustache, shaved his beard down to the base of his adam's apple and combed his chest hair so that it curled up and out. One of the girl's told him "as a friend, I'm telling you - you should lose the chest hair." He replied, "if I were rich people would call me eccentric." She said, "you're not rich and people just call you weird." Thanks for the memories.

 
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