1. You rank parishes by which one has the nicest incense.

2. When your kids are misbehaving, there’s this one old lady you’re afraid will come shush them even though you’ve forgotten she died ten years ago.

3. You’ve been guilty of the sin of liturgical disruption at least once, either by being or having a screeching baby, or by having your mobile phone ringer set to maximum.

4. You’re disillusioned by the rifts between Orthodox jurisdictions but are cautiously optimistic your grandchildren might see them resolved.

5. You’ve used your hands to put out a fire in someone’s clothing or hair after a candle accident and view this as no big deal.

6. You don’t know how to pronounce Slavonic words but that’s okay because you just stretch out the vowels while singing.

7. You’ve taken “The Lenten Triodion” to church to keep up with the service but then had it stolen by the choir director, who needed to look up that one hymn.

8. You’re relieved that the third hymn during Holy Saturday Lamentations is only 48 verses long.

9. The Hymn “O Pure Virgin” by St. Nektarios of Aegina unsettles you because some of the verses rhyme.

10. You’ve gotten in trouble for chanting too fast.

11. You wear overalls to the Canon of St. Andrew of Crete so you don’t have to adjust your pants after every prostration.

12. You know that if you have skills in accounting, property management, or professional fundraising, you have to keep them secret from the priest or you’ll end up on the parish council.

13. You meet a Protestant pastor and when he finds out you’re Orthodox, he talks your ear off about the liturgical / historical stuff that puts his adult education classes to sleep.

14. You view the Litany of Supplication as the Weekly News, where you find out who is pregnant or sick.

15. You’ve gotten in trouble for letting your baby crawl too much during liturgy in a pewless church.

16. You have friends with whom you can discuss politics, ex-spouses, hockey teams and all kinds of other controversial topics and have it go well just so long as no one mentions the Church Calendar.

17. You have gotten tipsy off one glass of wine on Holy Saturday because you haven’t eaten a thing in 36 hours.

18. You know where and when to park on Pascha night so you have some hope of getting out of the lot quickly.

19. You view cemeteries like neighborhoods — “Your dad’s at Sunset Hill? We have five people from our parish there. It’s a nice place.”

20. Your big Pascha dinner at home is on Bright Monday or Tuesday because you’re too darned tired on Sunday.

21. You sort your friends into gray beard, gray hair, and no hair.

22. You consider canned tuna a fasting food whenever despite the fact tuna a vertebrates because whatever, the alternatives are more expensive, more complicated and don’t taste good.

23. Your church’s carpet has several black spots from where the deacon or priest accidentally spilled charcoal from the censer. There is no hope of getting it out, and you accept this as normal.

24. You say “we just fixed that” for stuff that was installed at church 20 years ago.