Tyvm. 
You are a very good husband and for that alone, your wife should treasure you like the living god you are. Cotton balls, especially the cotton in medicine bottles, are just awful stuff. The fibers are so very dry and they sort of squeek over each other like hundreds of fingernails on chalkboards. Pulling the cotton out of the bottle is the worst because then the dry fibers skreeeeeek against the sides of the bottle and you get a tiny sort of vibration. I can feel it in my spine, like it’s being pulled along the bones, grating. Oddly, I’m always reminded of the scene in Pink Floyd’s The Wall where he starts slicing his eyebrows with a razor blade. But I don’t have a phobia or anything.
Nope, if I’ve got a phobia, it’s probably a fear of roaches. Nothing makes me want to claw my skin off more than those hell monsters. Oh dear og, the hissing cockroaches. I’d choose sweet, sweet death over having to be in the same room with one of those. Which is odd, because I’ve encountered maybe four regular roaches in my entire life and never a hissing cockroach. Very irrational and ripe for teasing. If it makes you feel any better** Dio**, I don’t hold anything against the people who’ve teased. It’s just so goofy to have that sort of reaction to a bug. I would tease myself, but I’d pass out half way through the planning stage.
Wouldn’t the victimhood of a person depend on the degree to which the phobia has developed? Deliberately locking a person who has severe claustrophobia into a closet would be torture. The same person with therapy and/or medication for a period of time might be able to deal with the fear or tolerate the situation. Or someone else with mild claustrophobia might just be a little dizzy, sweaty and pissed.
Mental anguish is very real.
The strangest phobia that I have known was a fear of using one’s hands. The woman that I met in phobia therapy some 30 years ago couldn’t write a check or pass the offering plate in church. Those are two of the things that I remember. I wonder if the fear was just of using her hands in public.
I didn’t fly for 32 years. Years of therapy and medication for depression have made the difference I suppose.
You may be right and having a mental quirk is the new black. (We all know how much fun it really is.) Or possibly people are encouraging others to talk about mental health problems more openly so that there won’t be such a stigma attached.
I honestly believe that you were just trying to be funny and that you didn’t know that you were harassing her. All of that is behind you now so I’m not taking a personal shot at you.
But that particular argument that I’ve pieced together is often the same argument used in other situations with co-workers who harass.
I understand that captive monkeys who do not fear snakes or spiders immediately become fearful upon obersving the reaction of a wild monkey which does, and even that some captive monkeys who had never seen a snake freaked out when some tubing was left on the floor. This indicates that some phobias might actually have a neurophysical basis evolutionarily hardwiredto recognise a dangerous shape, and others might arise from seeing a negative reaction on behalf of someone close to you.
For cotton wool balls, rubbing one produces a rather unpleasant stick-slip motion a little like a low-frequency version of fingernails on a blackboard. Biting cotton wool is especially unpleasant. Dio’s colleague might have witnessed a friend or family member’s discomfort at handling cotton wool or, more likely still, remembered the unpleasant sensation of biting cotton wool after losing a milk tooth. This association might not be so irrational, really.
That’s why I don’t like coconut. It’s like eating hair.
Uhh…you’re supposed to crack them open and eat the inside.
Daniel
Cute.
But I mean, of course, the little shredded bits that people inexplicably sprinkle on the tops of otherwise delicious foods, like cream pies and so forth.
Interesting. Does the problem relate to both fresh and bagged coconut? Personally, I can’t stand non-fresh coconut, but if I have seen the thing cracked open, then I can eat it.
Now, that brings up another interesting point. Where does the human aversion to eating hair come from? I think it is pretty universal for humans - you’re chowing down on a mouthful of food, you get a hair in there, and you’re spitting and gagging and GET THAT DAMNED HAIR OUT OF MY MOUTH.
Dio, would it be possible that your treatment of the co-worker with the cotton ball phobia might be a bit of transference from your own self-loathing from when you were the weak, different one?
I know–I just can’t pass up a straight line.
(And I love coconut, too–my lovely wife is making me a coconut cake for my birthday tomorrow. Yay!)
Daniel
No, because I wasn’t do it to exploit a perceived weakness. My impulse in those cases is always to defend the victim. I did it because I thought she was kidding. I thought she was just being theatrical and joking around. I believed she had an aversion to cotton but I thought she was exaggerating it to be humorous,
This was addressed to featherlou.
It’s not completely universal. Look up trichophagia for a disturbing glimpse into the psyche of the human animal.
And for all that’s holy, can movie producers and directors stop with the giant spider monsters? Yeah, I watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and loved it, but getting through that scene was hard.
I read that Peter Jackson is arachnophobic himself. That’s probably why he was able to communicate the terror of spiders so well to the screen.
Heh. Too bad it was all computer-generated, no? Woulda liked to see him on set directing that thing around. Yeesh.
Methinks those tech wizards take entirely too much delight in making Shelob extremely realistic. Bastards.
And this from someone who owns the movie Arachnophobia. I rarely watch it (I can’t even recall the last - perhaps first? - time I did so), but I still own it.
Well, you really can’t blame Jackson for that-you’d have to go and try to channel the spirit of J. R. R. Tolkien to express your displeasure.
Who let Admiral Ackbar in here?
Ever seen An Evening with Kevin Smith, in which he talks to college students about film-making? Smith has some amusing comments about producer Jon Peters, who believed spiders are the fiercest predators in the animal kingdom and wanted Smith to write a fight scene between a giant spider and Superman for the the then-in-development film. That project fell apart, but Peters went on to produce Wild Wild West.
I just watched the long version of the movies last week, and some of the commentaries, and he did mention that he’s arachnophobic, indeed. He had Shelob created on the basis of a real small spider that lives in the area around the place he’s living.