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…smoked.

The first time I smoked cigarettes, it was like coming home. I was in my second year of college, and I was an anti-smoker. Not a non-smoker, but an anti-smoker. One of those people who would talk about lung cancer audibly in front of smokers. I could smell a cigarette a hundred yards away and break into a diatribe. Then, I had a dream. I dreamt one night that I was walking downtown with a friend. We went bar-hopping, talking about political, religious, and social issues, with me chain-smoking the entire time. One of those dreams that lasts all night. I woke up in the morning, and the first thing I reached for was not, as usual, my glasses, but instead, my pack of smokes… which was not there, because I did not smoke. I jonesed for cigarettes like someone who’s been smoking their whole life. Finally, after a week, I went and bought a pack, and I smoked my first cigarette, a Camel Turkish Gold, on a playground. I never coughed, I never spluttered, I just drank in that warm nicotine smoke. I hated cigarettes until I had a dream that I smoked one. Then it was all over.

–Submitted anonymously.

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…whistled.

I was 18 when I first whistled.  Before that I had just sputtered tuneless nonsense from between my lips.  People told me I had “good whistling lips,” but it had never happened for me.  I felt pretty ashamed about this.  After a while, I just stopped trying.

So it was with some surprise that I found myself on November 7, 1993, whistling, kind of out of the blue.  I was in the parking lot of an apartment complex in Birmingham, Alabama, waiting for my girlfriend and friends to show up.  We went to different colleges, and so we were meeting up to go see a Smashing Pumpkins there (great show, btw).  I think my problem was that I’d always tried to whistle, that I’d listened to people tell me what I was supposed to do, and then tried to replicate it.  I was trying too hard.

It happened automatically, really.  I said to myself, “What’s that sound?” and then I realized it was me making it (the call is coming from inside the house!).  It was a crappy, out of tune version of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.  To this day, that’s my go-to whistling song, and it hasn’t gotten any better.

Whatever.  Whistling’s annoying anyway.