Bodily functions

You never really think of it this way, but cats are pretty damn good at embarrassing you in front of new boyfriends – or at least mine were when I started going out with Sam.

It was about three years ago, and I still lived at home. Sam and I had just gotten together, so everything in our relationship was exciting and delicate – uncharted territory. We were still reasonably polite and shy around eachother, which is more than I can say now. We have well and truly left manners behind.

So it was still early days, and Sam came to visit me where I lived with my family in Welcome Bay. Because he was my second ever boyfriend (I didn’t get out much), I’d never established any rules with my mother. As a result, we spent a lot of time hanging out in my room together. As we wandered into my room one day, a foul smell assailed us. A quick glance around the premises revealed the source of the stench: cat poop in the corner. I knew who the culprit was too, because we had one cat (out of about four) who was notorious for doing her business inside, despite being able to go outside whenever she wanted.

There are few words to describe the humiliation I felt when I realised I would have to get down on my hands and knees and clean up fresh cat poop in front of my brand new boyfriend. I still have not forgiven the cat for that.

My other embarrassing cat, Tasha, was a sickly Russian Blue. She’d had a never-ending cold for a million years, and spent a lot of time sneezing. And when Tasha sneezed, well, it wasn’t pretty.

One evening, after Sam walked me to the front door, he stopped to kiss me goodnight and we heard an almighty sneeze beside us. We both turned to look at Tasha, who was gazing happily up at us, a long line of cat snot coating the whiskers on the left side of her face. You’d think that was bad, but the worst was yet to come.

Quickly, so quickly I barely even saw it happen, Tasha stuck out her tongue and sucked all the snot back up into her mouth and swallowed it, looking up at us happily all the while.

Luckily the hilarity of it triumphed over the grossness of it all, and Sam and I still laugh about it today.

A fear you never knew you had

I have just learnt about a phobia that I never previously realised I suffered from.

Trypophobia.

Here’s the best way I can sum it up. You know when you see something with lots and lots of tiny holes in it, like beehives, ant holes, and lotus heads (I stole these examples from Wikipedia), and you get a squirmy, uncomfortable, shivery feeling? That’s trypophobia. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, and you’re probably wondering why anybody would have such a ridiculous phobia, but google image search it and you might understand what I’m talking about. I think it’s about a hundred times worse when it’s on someone’s body.

Apparently this reaction people get, where they feel disgusted and inexplicably freaked out, is based on a biological revulsion, rather than a learned fear. Don’t take my word for it though because I really am only getting my information from Wikipedia. I promise I’m not always this lazy.

Anyway, since scrolling through the photos a google search of trypophobia provided, I can’t shake off those shuddery feelings. How bizarre.

Skin crawling

I’m going to gender stereotype here a wee bit by saying anyone who knows me well enough knows that I’m just like most other girls – that is, bugs and insects will send me running for the hills with my arms in the air like a cartoon character. Anyone who has lived with me will know this fear of creepy-crawlies is near crippling, often reducing me to a tearful, shivering mess.

Last night, I became that mess.

I was lucky that my boyfriend, Sam, had come over from Tauranga to see me for the weekend, so I was not alone when the unthinkable happened. We’d long since gone to sleep, but as I haven’t yet gotten used to sleeping next to another person, it was a relatively broken sleep, and whenever Sam moved, I’d wake up. At around 4am, Sam turned over. I too, turned over and adjusted the blankets around me. As I did this, I felt something sharp on my waist.

I’d like to think my movements were lightning quick at this point. I slammed my hand to my skin, pinching whatever the sharp thing was between my fingers, and uttering a loud swear word, which was enough to rouse Sam from his light slumber. He leaned up and looked at me, and I could just make out his confused face in the faint light from the moon shining through my pitifully thin curtains.

“Sorry, Sam, I really need to turn on the lamp,” I said.

I leaned over and flicked the switch on, bringing my hand in front of my face to inspect the mysterious sharp thing between my fingers.

Friends, I don’t know what out of the following events was more horrifying – seeing the solitary cockroach leg in my hand and not knowing where the rest of it was, or feeling a tickle further up my back, slamming my hand onto my shoulder, and feeling it squish into the ends of my hair and onto my skin.

The next ten seconds were spent flailing around in absolute terror as I realised what had happened, while Sam looked on in bewilderment, still half asleep and not understanding my distress. Now, some people may think me ridiculous, but cockroaches are right up there with spiders as the most terrifying and disgusting bugs in my books. I can’t stand them. It doesn’t just mean I think they’re gross, it means I will literally start throwing things off my shelves and pulling half my hair out when faced with the task of removing a cockroach on my own. My brain just goes into freak-out mode, so by this point, I was sobbing my heart out while poor Sam tried to figure out what was going on.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, sounding suitably concerned.

“There’s – there’s a  – there’s a cockroach under my hand,” I whimpered hysterically. “It’s on my back, under my hand. It’s in my hair! I THINK I SQUISHED IT!”

I’ve tidied up the dialogue for this post, but in reality my words were a lot less coherent, with a lot more bad words, and a lot more crying.

“What do you want me to do, Babe?” Sam asked, looking sympathetically at the tears coursing freely down my cheeks.

“I don’t know!” I wailed.

Keeping my hand plastered to my shoulder, where the villain of the story was still twitching away, I edged off the bed and into the middle of the room. gathering up all my courage (the same kind of courage you have to gather to take the lid off the jar when you’ve trapped a bug inside it), I threw the monster to the floor, shook myself like a wet dog, and started crying even more uncontrollably than I had been before.

I’d like to say that even though a simple bug reduced me to such a state, I’m not a completely pathetic human being. There’s something about waking in the middle of the night and feeling something crawling across your skin, and realising it’s made its way up into your hair, that will simply destroy any small modicum of composure one retains. I’ve never been good with bugs, it’s my irrational fear, and this was all just too much for me.

Sam scrambled out of bed and wrapped his arms around me, rubbing my back as I cried into his chest, still shaking. Then, being surprisingly cooperative for how sleepy he must have been, he came with me to the bathroom, where I got him to wipe my shoulder with a flannel and check my hair for any stray cockroach bits. He went to retrieve the offender from my bedroom floor and flush it down the toilet.

“You wanna know what’s gross?” he said, “it’s still alive.”

That didn’t really make me feel any better.

I think I may be a bit jittery for the next few days.

A taste for the finer things

I wandered into the rumpus room of my grandparents house yesterday to play on their baby grand piano while I’m here visiting. I noticed, with a grimace, that there was a big, brown spider dead (thankfully) behind the piano chair. Possessing no desire to move it or in fact touch it in any way, I sat down and ignored it.

I could not say the same for my cat, Tonka.

As he waltzed into the room behind me, he was immediately drawn to the small, food-sized bug in the corner. As I sat down to play I distinctly heard a crunching noise, and shuddered.

It was only when I came back into the room later in the evening that I realised Tonka had left all this behind: 

Someone obviously isn’t a fan of the legs.

Please no

I stumbled, unfortunately, upon this tweet today, which has left me in a state of revulsion and shock.

this is why you wear footwear in public pools/gyms/showers: pic.twitter.com/SlRBsCeIse

— David Farrier (@davidfarrier) June 15, 2013

Click on the link at your own risk. For those too afraid to do so, I can only describe it as unpopped corn kernels growing out of somebody’s foot. I’m currently sitting at my computer chanting repeatedly “please let it be photoshopped, please let it be photoshopped, please let it be photoshopped”. I still don’t know if it’s real or not, but I have a horrible, sinking feeling that someone out there may have a creepy growth on their foot like that.

The worst thing is that you can’t help but keep staring at it in horror. It’s like a car crash – you can’t not look.