[Reading time: 7 minutes. Hopefully each one is entertaining.]
And initially you’re like, Er no, isn’t this completely normal? Doesn’t everyone do this? All the time thinking It’s not me that’s weird, it’s them…
Over the years I’ll admit to quite a few of these types of weird things I do that I don’t even think about. I’m sure everyone reading this will have at least ONE thing that they do that others find really odd, weird or irrational. But we’ve done them for so long, and they’re so ingrained into our psyche, that we do them without a second thought.
And if it’s not weird things that we DO, then it’s probably weird things that we have a bit of a phobia about. They’re usually irrational. The things we’re afraid of are usually completely harmless. They’re not at all frightening to any normal, sane human being…
(Speak for yourself, Catherine! says everyone reading this)
…but still we go on, finding them creepy, scary or both.
So just for a bit of fun on a Friday, here’s My Top 11 Weird Sh*t for your amusement.
And if you – or anyone else you know – does this stuff/finds these things scary too, tell me in the comments so I know I’m not alone. Don’t forget to share your OWN weird sh*t, too…!
Stay safe XOXO
This is my number one weird phobia… I cannot STAND bubble baths. Ughhhhhhhhh the idea of bubbles touching my skin makes me shiver at the very thought. They just stick to you and feel all creepy and won’t get off your skin. When I was a kid my mum would run me a bubble bath, and I’d have to push all the bubbles down one end before getting in. And then spend the whole bathtime trying to keep splashing at them to stop them touching me.
Just, no. NO, NO, NO to bubbles.
You know when you have a tub of butter spread (or equivalent) and it has deep knife marks in it where people have scraped it out? I can’t stand it being scraped out unevenly. Even worse, when it’s all scraped down to the bottom on one side and the spread is still high on another side.
AAAAAAAAAAARGH NO MAKE IT STOP
I absolutely HAVE to scrape it out so that the level of the spread is even all over every time I use it, right up until the tub is empty. I’ve often “respread the spread” in the tub when Keith has scraped it all out on one side just to restore the balance of the universe. However, I told him about my weird phobia of this only recently – it’s what gave me the idea for this post – and he had no idea. I’d obviously kept this one well hidden from him for nearly 20 years.
You know what? I didn’t ask him to, but since then he’s scraped it out evenly just to appease my weirdness. That’s love for you ♥.
I might as well start all these weird phobias with “I can’t stand…” – this time it’s untucked bed covers. I don’t care how hot it is, if the bed covers have come loose at the bottom of the bed I can’t sleep. We make our bed with a duvet cover, then a large blanket over the top. The blanket goes down over the foot of the bed and gets tucked neatly under the mattress. (That baby ain’t moving for NO ONE.)
I can’t stand the duvet becoming loose at the bottom of the bed and my foot feeling the end of the duvet where the buttons/poppers are. If it’s not strapped down, you know what will happen, don’t you?! Er, that’s right – the monsters will grab my feet in the night. I’m always telling Keith this, but good lord that man still sticks a foot outside the sheets in the night.
I told him that when the monsters DO bite off his feet (which they WILL), he shouldn’t come running to me.
I’ve mentioned this on the blog before: If I turn round 360° – for whatever reason – I simply HAVE to turn back again, otherwise I will be permanently wound up. In fact, anything over 180° means I have to “unravel” myself. If I don’t do this I feel completely weird, so I might save the unwinding for when no one can see me. But if I don’t wait and unravel immediately, you can imagine the little Turning Around Dance I’m doing with myself.
Another one where the mere thought of it makes me shudder: if I go to use a towel that’s wet from someone else using it (like using the guest hand towel in someone else’s house), it completely creeps me out. Even if I KNEW it was a totally fresh, clean towel, if it’s a bit wet from just ONE person using it before me, I’m creeped out like there’s no tomorrow. It automatically feels dirty to me and it feels like my hands need washing again.
And in case you’re wondering about my own bath towel in the winter when they can take longer to dry (though we have towel radiators): I have that covered. When I go to use my bath towel, I’m always very nearly dry. After showering I wipe myself down roughly with a clean flannel. Then by the time I reach for the bath towel, there’s hardly any water on me bod. So my bath towel never, ever gets wet… not even particularly damp. I’ve got it all worked out. No creepy damp towels for me.
This is one that I regretfully cannot avoid. I have to put up with this, but crikey I hate it, and always have. You know when you wash your hair and the inevitable loose strands of hair come out – even worse, when you comb through conditioner and you get quite a few strands come loose?!
I HATE THE WET STRANDS OF HAIR STUCK TO MY HANDS AND IN BETWEEN THE FINGERS AND OH GOD EVEN WORSE LOOSE HAIR STUCK TO MY BODY IN THE SHOWER NOOOOOOO
The only solution for this would be for me to shave my hair off and never have hair ever again. But then, my hair is more precious to me than my phobia of loose wet hair, and therefore I have to put up with this one. I still act like a child EVERY time I wash my hair, going Ughhhhhhh nooooo get off my hands wet hair get off get off get off
Side note: I told Keith when we first lived together that there were two things he had to agree to do for me forever: 1. Deal with spiders, and 2. Clean hair out the plughole. Where no.2 is concerned, I do do my best to stop as much hair going down the plughole as possible, which means collecting all that wet loose hair as I wash it and then putting it in the bin. And every time I do it I have to stop myself puking…
Another one I’ve mentioned before, and yes, I know just how ‘Sleeping With the Enemy’ this sounds. I simply HAVE to have all the jars and tins in the cupboard facing the front. All labels to the front so I can see what they are. I like things to be organised. I like things in cupboards and drawers all laid out and visible, and anyway who wants to spend time rooting round a cupboard for a tin of chopped tomatoes because they’re not facing the front, or not in the right place in the cupboard?
Oh, I forgot to mention that. They have to be put in the right place every time too, all for ease of use and an easy, stress-free life.
And yes, I’m probably a nightmare to live with and one day Keith will flush his wedding ring down the toilet and swim across the sea to be rid of me, I know.
Not strictly a teddy bear, but the stuffed toy you see in the main image. And it’s not just a stuffed toy… that’s Tigger. Tigger is known by everyone in my family, as I’ve had him since I was about 8 or 9. He’s pretty much part of the family.
(And to explain, I know he’s not a tiger, or even a Winnie the Pooh-style Tigger – I think he’s a cheetah. It’s just the name my eight-year-old self gave him.)
I know this is definitely a weird one, and it’s maybe a bit sad too, but I’ve slept with that little guy at my side for about 40 years. It’s one of those things that just became a habit, and it’s the feeling of him touching the right side of my torso, or my belly if I’m curled up on my side. (I swear he keeps me warm in the winter, despite his diminutive size.) He’s the one thing I would HAVE to run back into the house for (excluding Keith and Suki of course) if the house was on fire because he’s basically part of me. Well, he is for one third of my day, anyway.
I don’t actually take him away with me when I’m working and staying in a hotel – heaven forbid I ever lost him or left him somewhere. In those instances I use a Tigger substitute: a rolled-up towel or sweater that’s about the right size does the trick. Weird? Of course not…
I know I’m not alone here. Changing the volume on the TV or car stereo? It HAS to be an even number. I’m not a fan of odd numbers anyway (I turn 48 in July but have been saying I’m 48 since the start of the year because 47 sounds horrible).
But actually seeing the odd number lingering there for a second or so before it disappears torments me. If you’re a passenger in my car don’t even THINK about leaving the volume at 19 or 23. It’s really not that much effort to go up just one more, is it?
This I have a valid reason for (kind of) – it stems from something that happened to me as a kid. Basically I can’t go to sleep on my side unless my exposed ear is covered with my hair/the blanket/the duvet: if it’s just left there naked then moths will fly into my ears in the night and probably kill me. Because that’s how moths intending to take over the world kill humans, didn’t you know that?
When I was young a moth really DID fly into my ear when I was half asleep, and of course I went berserk. Spoiler alert: It didn’t actually kill me (I frantically batted at my ear till it flew away), but since then I’ve always made sure I have – at the very least – some of my hair draped over the ear. If not, my ear is just sitting there like a big bowl of human nakedness tempting moths to come down and have a look round its intricate complexity before making its final deathly aim down into my eardrum.
(Thank goodness we’re nearly at the end because I’m close to the point of phoning a psychiatrist after this Weird Sh*t Confessional and reading back over what I’ve written…)
Something I never thought about until I saw someone on TV describe doing the same thing is my strictness in putting away household items. Anything I clean and reuse, like plates, bowls, cutlery, tea towels, towels, bedlinens, pants, bras, socks, etc. have to be put away in proper rotation (not just on top every time). The newly-cleaned ones are put at the bottom (or at the back, depending on the item), making way for the other ones that have been in there longer to come to the top of the pile and get used next time.
My reasoning is that everything gets used evenly, and wear and tear isn’t heavier on the ones on the top/at the front the whole time. Plus, tea towels: I never have to iron them as instead they get “pressed” by being put to the bottom of the pile (I can’t BELIEVE people iron tea towels but many have told me they do. THEY’RE the crazy ones IMO).
The fact that I do this was brought to my attention when Dermot O’Leary was on an episode of Would I Lie to You? His ‘True or False’ statement was “I sometimes move bowls and plates from the bottom to the top of the pile so they don’t feel left out”.
Was he telling the truth? I’ll let you watch and find out, but let’s just say I watched the episode and kept shouting at the TV, That’s totally normal, people, why WOULDN’T you do that…?!!
P.S. Reading over this post now that it’s finished makes me a little bit worried about myself and how I’m coming across 😉 . In my defence, I’m really not a psychotic, high-maintenance freak who goes crazy at the sight of uneven margarine or the volume on the TV being set to a number not divisible by two. Please believe me, I’m really quite sane…
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