My Strange Addiction

Shall I talk about my maladies? No, you're not interested? Okay, point taken. I'll skip my maladies for now.

A couple of weeks ago when I was across the state, there were a number of things I did that I don't normally do - namely sleep in a bed by myself. Dang that's fun! I forgot how fun. Another thing was watch cable TV since we don't have cable. What does an oh so classy girl like myself watch?

Hoarders and My Strange Addiction - exploitative reality TV. My co-worker actually picked Hoarders while we were in the gym, and then My Strange Addiction came on after it. I think the point of these shows is to convince you of your mental stability unless you live with 32 cats, of which a few may be dead but you haven't yet realized it because you haven't found their carcasses or smelled their carcasses among the rotting garbage sitting in your house.

While Hoarders gets horribly repetitive, My Strange Addiction is actually kind of interesting. The first two seasons are on Netflix, which I then had to watch after seeing a woman addicted to drinking other people's blood.

We all have different ways of soothing/calming ourselves. Mornings are particularly rough for me, so I try to stick to my morning routine as much as possible to make the day start out okay. If something weird is going to happen to me, it becomes 5x worse if it happens before 10am. So I try to make the mornings go as smoothly as possible for my own sanity, and this includes a few rituals and possibly hugging the pillow I've had since I was a kid. And perhaps I still sleep with that pillow too. (There's an episode about a woman who takes her childhood pillow everywhere, not that it at ALL reminds me of myself...but I don't take my pillow grocery shopping or even out of the house.) Then there's an episode about a woman who sleeps with a blow dryer on, and as I type I am not looking over at the space heater that is blowing hot air on me and humming.

So maybe some of the oddities hit a little bit close to home. There are two categories of oddities featured on the show that creep me out:

Ingesting Non-Food Items: Eating drywall, glass, other people's blood, animals' blood, laundry detergent, bullets (doesn't he know those aren't digestible???) and Comet bleach seem extremely hazardous to your health. Glass? Really? This guy ate wine glasses. And then I remembered that I used to eat pencils when I was a kid...not quite as bad, but still it's not like I should be throwing stones.

Things As People: What broke my heart was when people substituted things (not even animals) for other people. Like one girl was a ventriloquist, and she took her puppets everywhere and talked through them. She got horribly anxious when she wasn't allowed access to her puppets because she didn't know how to function on her own. Another sad story was this guy who was married to a mannequin. He named this mannequin, dressed her, took her with him everywhere, and - ugh - had a "complete" relationship with his mannequin. Can you imagine having this guy and his mannequin over for dinner? Yeah, he didn't have any friends and just had his mannequin. In both of these instances, both of these people said that dealing with the puppets/mannequin was a whole lot easier than dealing with real people. It's so sad, but in some ways I can see exactly where they are coming from.

Going back to my space heater and pillow now... at least I don't have a mannequin that I carry around and take to work. (Can you imagine?!)