Things About Me That May or May Not Be Odd

This is me circa 1995, the scrubbed out face is someone I am no longer friends with. Nor do I still smoke cigarettes or drink beer. I am all classy these days. White wine spritzers and BBQ Shapes.

I was tagged for an Inspiring Blogger award recently by Nadja, and it's been a long time since I've done one of these, so I thought would be fun. I am supposed to give you 5 odd habits of mine, but I'm a rebel - and not an especially odd one - so instead I'll just tell you some random things about me that may or may not be odd.

1. I hate feet. I could never touch anyone’s feet and I hate people touching mine. I have also unfollowed people on various social platforms because they continually post pictures of their feet.

2. I’m afraid of clowns and heights, both of which are common, but I also have a fear of nuns and balloons. The balloon one has a simple explanation – I am easily startled and whenever I see a balloon I just wait nervously for it to pop. When Noodles was little she would get offered balloons from those costumed spruikers in shopping centres and she would always say, “No thank you. My mum is scared of balloons.” <3 The nun one I’m not sure about. I was raised Catholic, but except for my grandmother no one was especially religious and I didn’t go to a Catholic school. However, whenever I see a nun I get really jumpy and nervous, like some people do when they see a police officer. Interesting possible cause: a palm reader told me many years ago that I had been a nun in a past life, but that I had been sent there by my family and didn’t want to go so I was really unhappy. I don’t know if I believe that (the logical, rational, atheist side of me says that’s a crock) but it does seem like an odd coincidence.

3. I have hitched a ride on a boat. When I was a teenager my then best friend sneaked out of a holiday house we were staying at to go and see her boyfriend, after her mum had told her she wasn’t allowed to. I went with her because I didn’t really have much choice, and we walked around the beach but got stuck in the middle of the water when it got more and more muddy. We had an unclimbable rock face on one side and heading back into the mud on the other, and we were only wearing thongs on our feet. A speedboat went past so we stopped them and they gave a us a ride to a nearby island, which turned out to be a military shooting range! We were descended upon by soldiers who lectured us angrily about how we could have been killed and drove us to their entrance gate and rang our parents. Needless to say, neither of us was allowed to venture out of our houses except to go to school for quite some time.

4. I hate massages. They make me feel nauseous.

5. I’m very solitary. No matter how much I like a person, I have a limited tolerance for being in their company – I really like my own space. I struggle with work sometimes because I am forced to interact with a lot of people in my job, but it’s not as bad as it used to be when I was on the customer service side of things. I had to deal with dozens and dozens of people a day and I would go home and just not want to speak to anyone. Having said that, I am pretty good with people when I want to be. Or when I’m being paid to be.

6. Toys with faces creep me out. Dolls, teddy bears, stuffed toys, anything with eyes. I think it goes back to when I was really little and saw an episode of Fantasy Island where a bunch of toys would come to life at night and be all sinister. And I was also really young when I saw that crazy movie with the evil doll chasing Karen Black around. When I went to bed at night I always had to have all the dolls and stuffed toys shut away in the cupboard, with the exception of a couple of teddies I had on either side of me to fool burglars. My cousin had a clown doll and whenever I stayed at her house I made her put it in another room – I could not go to sleep while that thing was looking at me, it just freaked me out.

I tag:
Natalie
Jessica
Jacquie
Liz
Jade