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Confessions of Utter Insanity
Aug. 30th, 2005 09:55 amPeople at work have started to notice that I use the same plastic water cup (complete with a little paper sign on it that says "Do not nick") every day. I hope it's not regarded as too eccentric. My explanation for it is that I felt unable to justify throwing one out at the end of every day and taking a new one - even the cleaners seemed to disagree with me there, because every time I left a cup out on the desk it would be gone by the time I came in again in the morning. I experimented with hiding it for a while, behind the monitor or the computer on the desk, but they'd always find it sooner or later. Eventually I sellotaped the notice to it, and the problem was solved.
I am the same with plastic bags. Whenever I went to Tesco in St Andrews I always tried to remember to bring a bag with me, or to just take home what I'd bought in my large collection of pockets - after all, I usually only bought a sandwich or two. Of course, the plan always failed to some degree and I ended up with a corner cupboard piled to the ceiling with polythene by the time the year was out (although in my third year I was slightly better and it only got a quarter of the way). But I still irrationally feel rather guilty taking plastic bags from anywhere - especially in places like music stores when I could just put a purchase in my pocket rather than take one of their small and otherwise entirely useless bags, but the employees are always too fast for me. The bags all end up in the recycling eventually, but it seems a bit of a waste of time when I could just not bother with one in the first place. Is this genuinely an abnormal way of thinking?
There are other things about me that I've never considered unusual in the past but have been growing to realise that not everyone shares. One of these came to light when I mentioned to Whitney that I don't like inanimate objects with faces. This may be a remnant of when I was very young and had nightmares about the Matey shampoo bottles becoming sentient and swivelling to follow me around the room. Don't laugh. Oh, too late. Things like portraits on walls are the worst of them, but I even tend to leave books and magazines face down if there's a face on the cover to stop them from "staring" at me.
The same applies to computer monitors and televisions, particularly when I'm trying to sleep. When I had a cluster of monitors on my desk facing the bed I used to cover them with a sheet at night, and I always turn the television away from me before I go to bed. It's something about the blankness in them that makes me feel that they're somehow watching me. This whole entry is beginning to make me sound a bit more mad than I originally intended, but it's the truth.
I'm not all that fond of mirrors either. When I approach one it's not uncommon for me to test it first with one hand to see if it is indeed showing a reflection. What it would be showing if it wasn't a reflection is something that I haven't quite thought of. There's an old Trev and Simon book that's still in the bathroom bookcase that advised that in the event that you see a monster in the mirror instead of yourself, not to panic because what you mistakenly think is a mirror is in fact a television set showing Terry Wogan.
To try and bring some sense of normality back to this entry, one of my more normal phobias is that of lifts. I don't think it's claustrophobia, but I don't like the idea of being in an enclosed case that moves about, with no windows or any other indication of where you're moving. When I was in Garthdee last week, I had taken the lift up to the sixth floor and it decided shortly after starting to creak and judder to a halt before carrying on going. That didn't exactly help.
Thanks to living in Andrew Melville Hall for three years, I am now terrified of alarms. Whenever a car alarm, exit alarm in a shop or anything similar goes off, I jump about a foot in the air and have a compulsion to run out of the building. There's been one fire alarm at work while I've been here, and it's a nice alarm - it sounds like a school bell, not a shrieking red banshee hovering above my bed - so that's all right.
I think that's probably enough. If anyone else has any completely irrational fears, feel free to share them and convince me that I'm not totally mad.
I am the same with plastic bags. Whenever I went to Tesco in St Andrews I always tried to remember to bring a bag with me, or to just take home what I'd bought in my large collection of pockets - after all, I usually only bought a sandwich or two. Of course, the plan always failed to some degree and I ended up with a corner cupboard piled to the ceiling with polythene by the time the year was out (although in my third year I was slightly better and it only got a quarter of the way). But I still irrationally feel rather guilty taking plastic bags from anywhere - especially in places like music stores when I could just put a purchase in my pocket rather than take one of their small and otherwise entirely useless bags, but the employees are always too fast for me. The bags all end up in the recycling eventually, but it seems a bit of a waste of time when I could just not bother with one in the first place. Is this genuinely an abnormal way of thinking?
There are other things about me that I've never considered unusual in the past but have been growing to realise that not everyone shares. One of these came to light when I mentioned to Whitney that I don't like inanimate objects with faces. This may be a remnant of when I was very young and had nightmares about the Matey shampoo bottles becoming sentient and swivelling to follow me around the room. Don't laugh. Oh, too late. Things like portraits on walls are the worst of them, but I even tend to leave books and magazines face down if there's a face on the cover to stop them from "staring" at me.
The same applies to computer monitors and televisions, particularly when I'm trying to sleep. When I had a cluster of monitors on my desk facing the bed I used to cover them with a sheet at night, and I always turn the television away from me before I go to bed. It's something about the blankness in them that makes me feel that they're somehow watching me. This whole entry is beginning to make me sound a bit more mad than I originally intended, but it's the truth.
I'm not all that fond of mirrors either. When I approach one it's not uncommon for me to test it first with one hand to see if it is indeed showing a reflection. What it would be showing if it wasn't a reflection is something that I haven't quite thought of. There's an old Trev and Simon book that's still in the bathroom bookcase that advised that in the event that you see a monster in the mirror instead of yourself, not to panic because what you mistakenly think is a mirror is in fact a television set showing Terry Wogan.
To try and bring some sense of normality back to this entry, one of my more normal phobias is that of lifts. I don't think it's claustrophobia, but I don't like the idea of being in an enclosed case that moves about, with no windows or any other indication of where you're moving. When I was in Garthdee last week, I had taken the lift up to the sixth floor and it decided shortly after starting to creak and judder to a halt before carrying on going. That didn't exactly help.
Thanks to living in Andrew Melville Hall for three years, I am now terrified of alarms. Whenever a car alarm, exit alarm in a shop or anything similar goes off, I jump about a foot in the air and have a compulsion to run out of the building. There's been one fire alarm at work while I've been here, and it's a nice alarm - it sounds like a school bell, not a shrieking red banshee hovering above my bed - so that's all right.
I think that's probably enough. If anyone else has any completely irrational fears, feel free to share them and convince me that I'm not totally mad.
