Cooking, or more specifically the act of taking these 8 ingredients, doing bizarre machinations like sifting, stirring, chopping, blending, or basting and all of a sudden you have a 3 tiered cake. More specifically, seeing the end result makes me think about all of the horrible disasters that must have occured as people first tried to cook things.
Whoops, too much sugar, should have stirred when I actually pureed, and I didn’t cook long enough so my torte ended up looking like a melted squirrel.
YES!! I’m not the only on who wonders that! Vindication! This particular thought has been wandering around my brain off and on for years, and I simply can’t get rid of it. I guess it’s more a curiosity than a fear, since I don’t really CARE if someone else’s eyes looking at the sky see what I would think of as orange, though they call it blue, but it’s something to think about.
This is along similar lines to ** dwyr ** and ** LindyHopper ** 's posts about identity: What does it mean that I’m “ME”? There are a whole lot of other people walking around thinking they’re “me,” too. In public places, I sometimes look at all the other people and think "boy, it must be weird to be inside that body and think it’s me. But then, of course, I remember that they look at me and think the same thing (or maybe they don’t, but the point stands).
On a similarly egomaniacal note, the accident of birth. How did it happen, of all the eggs and sperm in the world, that I - the personality that is “ME” - ever came to be at all? Or, being born, how did I manage not to be something like a slug or a grasshopper or a cane toad, but instead managed to be a member of the human race - and not one of the billions of oppressed, starving ones in the Developing World? The odds were certainly against my being me. Or were they? Maybe consciousness isn’t related to what egg and sperm you came from. In which case I’m even MORE creeped out.
Ouch, my brain. Am I the only one who feels like this conversation should be taking place around a campfire?
I have blue-green color blindness, so the blue and green I see definitely ISN’T the blue and green you see. You know those color-blindness charts at the eye doctor, with the little, different-colored dots in a circle, and some shades of the dots form numerals? I go through about 3 pages seeing nothing but random dots, no numbers. Then, on the other colors, the numbers are vivid. THAT’S creepy.
One day I noticed (and it’s weirded me out ever since) that my state’s attorney general, Jennifer Granholm, looks almost exactly like what JonBenet Ramsey would have looked like as an adult. Granholm is running for Governor in Michigan in November, and it appear’s she’s going to win. (We’ll then have the hottest governor in the U.S. Much moreso than John Engler ;))
Mirrors also freak me out. Not so much mirrors themselves, but the mirror world. Ya know, the world of things that happens in the mirror. I’m convinced that the only part of it that matches our world is the part you can see. Like if you can see the reflection of your bedroom door in your bathroom mirror, the bedroom in the mirror world is probably decorated completely differently, and has different people living in it. I have this creepy feeling that one of these days, someone in the mirror world is going to screw up, and wander out of the mirror world bedroom while I’m looking in the mirror. While this will probably scare to me to death when it finally happens, a tiny part of my brain will be thinking “Heh. I knew it the whole time.”
I should probably not mention this, lest my Dopers pals refuse to ever get in a car with me, so let me stress that this never happens while I’m with other people… but … sometimes, when I’m driving alone, I have to make a real effort to limit my glances into the rearview mirror, otherwise I get distracted by the road in the mirror world.
freckles asks with some incredulity: “Belly buttons leak??”
Yup. You should really read your Cecil more often. This was the featured article just a few days ago.
Wow, jackelope. I get the exact same thing. It’s usually as I’m lying in bed, before falling asleep. I feel as if the walls sort of recede, and fade into an empty grey space, and I become tiny and insignificant in the massiveness of all that’s around me. I sometimes start to hear voices, booming off in the distance, and after a while I’ll sort of twitch out of it. Your post totally creeped me out.
Something that creeps me out is people I see all the time on the train. I recognize a lot of people from commuting, and I always find it kind of remarkable when I encounter someone at least three times a week like that. On a related note, I get a little tweaked out when I see someone I know on the train or bus. The last time it happened I sat down next to one of my best friends (whom I talk to pretty much every day and see every weekend), and didn’t even know it was him until he smacked me. Maybe I’m freaked by the idea that I could be so totally oblivious to things going on around me that those things simply cease to exist. It was just me and the book.
I’m also freaked out by the fact that my parents created me. I’m not talking about the sex, or anything, but just the fact that I wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for their genetic information colliding. That then feeds into thinking about family trees, and geneaologies, and how if one ancestor hundreds of years back never met the other I wouldn’t be here and so on.
**delphica[/N]: All I can think about is Alice Through the Looking Glass. That story creeped me out for years.
Mirrors in the idea that, are we the original, or the reflection?
The number of complete strangers who may walk by you during the day and, if aroused by you, may go home and dream or fantasize about you. Complete strangers, sharing this intimate experience with your image.
Does food taste differently to you than to anyone else? For example, I hate mushrooms, but is it because to me they taste like something horrible, but to someone else they may taste like steak tastes to me?
Good God, UncleBeer, you are pure evil. Just the fact that you found that site now puts you on my list of things that freak me out the more I think about them.
You’re a very bad man.
This may be just me, but I am freaked out by deep water. Mainly the ocean, but I don’t like lakes either. Just the idea of this huge gulf below me, filled with liquid, and these animals swimming through it below me.
Old houses also bug me; what happened there? There could well have been a grisly murder in the house where you’re living, and you would never know. What have those places seen?
Sewers: there are tunnels under the cities and no one knows where they go, how deep, or what’s in them. Lovecraft’s story Pickman’s Model did not help with this concern of mine…
Jeez, there are so many things for me to say. First of all, yes, I do feel this should be a conversation around a campfire.
-The massive, disproportional size thing, that used to happen to me when I was a kid and it freaked me out immensely, but it hasn’t happened in years.
-The idea of strangers fantasizing about me is a bit disturbing.
-And on a related note, photographs. I warn you, this is a very weird one. I have somewhat talked myself out of this one, but have you ever placed a photo of someone in your house, and then, lets say walked thought that room naked, and then had the weird feeling like they can see you through their picture and have seen you naked? Am I the only one who can’t see through the eyes of photographs of me? I know, I’m insane.
Airplanes: As big as a building, weighs tons, TONS! And yet, if you get it going speedy down a rather short street, it’ll float in the air. I’m nowhere near as big as an airplane, and no matter how speedy I go down a short street, I don’t float (unless I’m in the airplane!)
“Oh, but it’s the shape of the wings, laddy” The devil you say, I’ve heard all that rot about air traveling at different speeds above and below the wings, yada yada yada. I don’t buy it! I think the whole thing is a mass hallucination.
Food: Think about it, who figured out food? All over the world folks consume different stuff. What one culture considers lunch another throws away. It must have been a real case of trial and error at the beginning.
Og: “Oh look, that thing just fell out of a birds behind, I think I’ll eat it!”
Ug: “Oh look, that thing just fell out of a goats behind, I think I’ll eat it!”
Kissing- Hugging, cuddling, and holding hands I understand. ‘I feel affection for you and desire physical closeness’. The desire for sex is hardwired. But whence kissing? How did sticking your tongue in sombody else’s mouth become a sign of affection? Is it found in all cultures? Or is it some early cultural invention?
Black and White Television-I do NOT hallucinate. I’d like to make that clear. But 90% of the time when I’m watching B&W my brain colorises it. Usually the colors are correct. But soemtimes there are errors. The first time I saw SpellBinder on BatMan Beyond was on a B&W portable set. When I caught that episode in rerun, I found that SpellBinder’s costume was black and red. My brain had filled it in as black and tan(And I’ve never had the drink of that name. So keep your puns in your pockets)
Breathing: Your body does this all by itself all the time. Why doesn’t it ever accidentally stop? If I think about it too much, I find myself forcing myself to breathe, and I have to keep doing that until I get busy doing something else and my body takes over again. Weird.
Dreams: Weird stuff! Does your brain get bored when you sleep, and just start making stuff up? Also, whenever you see a stranger in your dream…where did this person come from? Is this somebody you passed on the street, or did you create this pseudo-person?
Babies: Not so much that babies exist, but that at one point in our life we are this little helpless tiny person that can’t speak or control our bowel movements. For that matter, I’ll never understand how babies learn to talk or do anything.
I’ll also throw in the fact that clowns, ventriloquist dummies, and some dolls are mega creepy.
I think of that but with food. What if what I taste is totally different from what you taste? I don’t understand the whole tastebuds thing. I also wonder what if I’m the only person here? What if everything else, everyone one, everything that I know is all just a product of my imagination?
Re incarnation If there is such a thing, how do I know if I’ve already been reincarnated or not? This is weird but I think my cat was reincarnated so sometimes I talk to her. I try every language I have some knowledge about french, polish, italian, german and english. I’m scared of having her in my room while I sleep. How can I trust an animal with long sharp claws and teeth that can easily jump on my face claws out into my eyelids seering off my skin.
I have another one:
The sound of your own voice when you hear it on a recording. How can it be that that is how I sound? Do I sound like that to other people? How can it be so different from the sound of my own voice in my head? It freaks me out. :s
The fact that so much of space is uninhabitable. Everything from the temperature extremes, lack of atmosphere, and exposure to radiation would all kill us instantly, yet 6 billion of us humans, not to mention billions more life forms, are all protected in a very tiny safe zone of the universe where our planet provides us protection from the hostile elements of the cosmos.
The fact that so much of the earth’s surface itself is uninhabitable. The oceans take 70% of it right off, then there are the polar regions, the deserts and the mountains. What’s left for us to live on, even with modern methods to make less habitable places more livable, is only a small percentage of the total land space there is.
I have also thought about the fact that every car that whizzes past me on the other side of the road is a near collision that didn’t happen and that there is only a small margin of error before such a collision could occur.
I often think about what I say to other people and when I say it because my timing and my choice of words may change the entire course of their lives. For example, if I say goodbye to a friend as he is leaving my house I may think of something else I wanted to tell him before he left. If it isn’t that important I may decide to call him once I figure he’s made it home. So I wait a few minutes, call him and find out that he hasn’t made it back. I try back later and he’s still not home. After several tries and three hours have passed I begin to wonder what happened to him. Eventually I may find out he was in a fatal car accident. In such a situation I’d always be thinking that if I only chose to talk to him as he was leaving instead of waiting to call him once he got home, I would have delayed him enough that the accident probably would not have happened. I think about the reverse of this, where perhaps my actions changed the course of someone’s life such that they averted an accident or other tragedy that may have happened otherwise.
On a smaller scale, whenever I hear a really bad song I have to think about the fact that at least three, four, five people, whatever, all had to agree that this song was worthy of writing, recording and distributing to the masses.
Have you ever been deeply engrossed in a great book, and then “snapped out of it?” It was like you were watching a movie, and suddenly it once again becomes a bunch of black-ink words on bland paper.
For that matter, the kind of trance you go into watching a movie in the theater is similar.
I think it was Myron somebodyorother, can’t recall the last name at the moment.
Now for another contribution…
ever realize that the ovum that would become the unique individual know as “you” was created when your mother was a fetus? You’re a lot older than you think.