Am I really wired that weirdly?? I cannot handle steel wool pads with my bare hands. It gives me the SAME weird abrasive feeling in my teeth that I get if I bite into an UNDER ripe banana.
I don't lose a lot of sleep over this, but does anyone else have this tactile response? A part of it is mental, Mommy used to admonish me and say, " you know, steel wool can enter your skin and get into your bloodstream and get lodged in your heart". Mom was a barrel of laughs, lemme tell you.
No,this is an actual physical response to touching it. It almost makes me shudder to touch them. <sob> Why? Needlesss to say, steel wool and banana sandwiches are OUT in my home
I get exactly the same thing from touching towels or toilet paper with dry hands. It drives me nuts. Also the thought of biting into a roll of toilet paper is enough to get me going. Although I’ve never actually done that. No, really.
But I can’t stand touching paper when my hands are wet. And when people lick their fingers to turn pages of a book-- don’t get me started. That is messed up on so many levels. I can’t bear to watch it. My personal hell would probably be to spend eternity in a room full of people reading all my books and licking their fingers every time they turn a page.
The very finest gauges of steel wool produce mild sorts of the effects mentioned. Chewing on tin foil is most definitely fingernails-on-the-blackboard time for me. One winner that has not been mentioned yet is styrofoam. Certain grades of it are so dry that just touching it gives me the heebie-jeebies. The real payoff is even thinking about chewing on it.
I can drag my nails across a blackboard with no ill effects. (Not that I could find a true blackboard anymore).
However, I get the skeeves from touching brown paper bags, or those abrasive-like brown paper towels in commercial bathrooms. Brrrrrrrrr.
Steel wool doesn’t bother me, but then again, I wear gloves. I use it a lot for wood re-finishing, and there’s nothing like getting metal splinters to make your day.
“Pet skeeve” is a hilarious and apt term!
Mine are:
Biting into strawberries (it’s not the taste, it’s all those little seeds - eeyyurrch!)
Even just the thought of running my teeth over cotton sheets makes me go all shivery. Bleah. Dunno why one would do that with one’s teeth, though. Lawks, I’m loopy!
If anything touches my wrists, I get really scared. If I scratch my teeth on glass (like if I’m drinking), It makes chills go up my spine. If I scractch against a wall that’s painted, the same thing happens.
I really hate handling whole fish. The times I had to do fish in culinary school were torturous. The feeling of those scales are much like fingernails on a chalkboard.
The very thought of barnacles puts a big twist in my knickers. My BF once said something about what it would be like to have barncles growing all over one’s head and I almost flipped out of my skin . . . . bleeeehhhhh. We must have been watching a show about whales or something. I need to stop thinking about it now.
This one gets me a lot of odd looks. Know those kinda corrugated cardboard drink trays places give you to hold your drinks? OH MY GOD. I can’t touch those. I would rather stab myself about the head with an electric eel than handle one of those. I will risk third degree burns and make many trips rather than handle one of those. My friends at work tortured me once by collecting them for weeks and laying them all over my cube. Oy…
On a similar note, silk kinda oogs me out. If it’s good quality it’s ok. But something about how cheap silk catches on my fingerprints. Eek!
God, my teeth are watering just thinking about all that stuff.
Handling raw chicken will get me every time. I used to be able to do this without any problems, until my first pregnancy. I was eight weeks along and my morning sickness was just starting to get really bad. The feel of the clammy skin, and the chicken-blood smell made by stomach do cartwheels in my throat.
I love to eat chicken; I just can’t get the stuff into the pan without feeling queasy. Urp.
