First: after reading all of your comments on my entry about phobias, I realised that actually, I have WAY more phobias than I had written about, and, indeed, that I had completely omitted some of my biggest, and most all-consuming phobias. Maybe I was trying to suppress the thought of them or something?
Well, because the thought of leaving an entry unfinished makes me break out in hives, I went back and edited it to add them in, and to make the entry in question only slightly shorter than my University Dissertation (On the Road: the American dream as seen by Jack Kerouac, JD Salinger and someone else who I totally can’t remember anymore. So that was a worthwhile exercise, no?). So, yes, you can go back and read the bits you missed if you have a burning desire to delve even further into my psyche. Death! Cancer! People who kind of rumble sweets around their mouths before crunching them loudly! Fun times, people, fun times…
Anyway, this post isn’t actually about phobias. No, this post is about my hair, and how I went all the way to Edinburgh yesterday to have it cut, at great expense, I might add, in a salon that actually dries your hair after they’ve cut it and everything. Fancy! Round these here parts they just kick you out with your hair still wet, and I’m not even joking. Well, I mean, I am partly joking, because they will blow dry your hair if you really want them to, but they will also charge you extra for that service, and will mostly just not bother to do it.
I’m still not 100% sure what it was that possessed me to haul ass into the city and get a super-expensive haircut when, actually, I could just have driven the two minutes to the Little Hairdressing Shop of Horrors and have it cut for less than half the price, even if I decided to get all high falutin’ on them and ask for a blow dry as well as a cut. Well, actually, I kind of do know, to be honest. I think I did it because I’m always reading articles in women’s magazines which are all, “Spend lots of money on haircuts! Haircuts are an investment! You wear your hair everyday, so a haircut is the one thing you should not hesitate to spend a small fortune on!” So, I read these articles, and apparently I also lost my mind and forgot that I’ve had lots of expensive haircuts in my time, and they haven’t been any different AT ALL from the really cheap haircuts I’ve had, too, because yesterday afternoon found me paying the aforementioned sum of money in order to end up looking exactly the same as I did before:
Hi! I am exactly the same as before! I’m also really rubbish at the “taking a photo of yourself in the mirror” thing, I wonder how other people manage to do that?
My advice to you, then, would be this: if you are the kind of person who always seems to end up with exactly the same haircut, no matter how hard you try to change it, don’t spend lots of money on haircuts. Spend a lot of money on shoes, instead. No one will know the difference with your hair, and at least you’ll have lots of nice shoes. < /wiseoldsage>
I did have a good day, though, even although I managed to perform my usual trick of “spending all my money but not actually having very much to show for it”, and will now have to live off water and gruel for the rest of the month. Because I am a workaholic, you see, it’s not often that I get to spend an entire day walking around the shops, and as I walk around shoe shops in the same way other, more cultured people, walk around art galleries, this was a nice little break for me.
The salon I had my hair cut in is located inside Harvey Nichols, so I got there early and amused/tortured myself by spending some time winding up the shop assistants by inserting my poverty-stricken and clearly unworthy self amongst the merchandise and making as if I was actually going to reach out and touch something with my grubby, proletariat hands every so often. By the time I left for my hair appointment, I had a whole little gaggle of them following me around the store at a disdainful distance, and when I made my usual pilgrimage to the Christian Louboutin section and actually dared to pick up a shoe, I swear they all gave a collective little gasp and tottered backwards in shock. So that was fun.
Of course, today on the way to the gym, my car (Terry’s is still in the garage, being held at ransom) started to make a funny whirring noise, which was different from all of the other funny whirring noises it has made, and which probably means that as soon as we have liberated Terry’s car, mine will be incarcerated in its place, and yet more money will be sucked from me. It’s not true that you can’t get blood from a stone, you know – the folks at our local garage manage it just fine.
Back to the Little Hairdressing Shop of Horrors for me next time, then.
Inspired by Toni’s post yesterday about phobias, I thought to myself: hey! I have me some phobias too! In fact, my mind, it is a strange, creepy town riddled with dark, twisting alleyways which I bet the Forever Amber readers would just love to explore. In other words: I’m a bit strange, me, and unless you’d like to hear about the brief snowfall we had yesterday, I got nothing for you here, so I’m just going to copy Toni take a leaf out of Toni’s book and tell you all about all the things that keep me awake at night.
So here we go – a quick tour through my troubled psyche, or “the things I have phobias about”.
1. Crabs and other crustaceans. But mostly crabs. (‘kabourophobia’)
I’ve touched on this before, but as Terry will tell you, I’ve never been one to shy away from the idea of repeating myself – I said, I’ve never been one to shy away from the idea of repeating myself – so let the record show that by far the biggest phobia in my life is the fear of crabs, lobsters, and anything else that lives in the sea, has a shell, and operates more than four legs, some of which contain pincers. So bad is this phobia, in fact, that I wasn’t able to copy Toni and show you little pictures of the things I’m scared of, because that would involve looking at pictures of crabs, and would then mean that I wouldn’t be able to view my own blog for as long as it takes for this post to drop off the front page. Yeah, I hate those suckers.
The phobia is so severe, you see, that I can’t even look at pictures of crustaceans, and when we’re in Florida, and we go to Publix, which has live lobsters in a tank (so that people can just pick them up! With their HANDS! AAAAAARRRRRGH!) I have to close my eyes so that my mum can guide me past it. If I do happen to see a crab, or a picture of a crab, I will generally drop any object I happen to be holding at the time, and I wake up a few times every month standing screaming next to the bed, having just leapt from it in terror, convinced that there are crabs in it. Because, you know how that’s always happening?
Despite this, as I noted on my last entry about this, fear of crustaceans is actually quite a good phobia to have, if you’re going to have a phobia, because the feckers don’t generally travel inland, so unless you live by the sea, you’re good. So, yes, ‘kabourophobia’: recommended. Only, not really.
2. Flying
Like Toni, my fear of flying arrived one day out of a clear blue sky, with absolutely no prior warning. A bit like a plane crash, in fact. Up until that point I had been flying through the skies with the greatest of ease, and without a single clutching-of-the-armrest moment. Then one day when I was kid, as the plane taxied along the runway, I sat bolt upright in my seat and started screaming, “I WANT TO GET OFF! I WANT TO GET OFF! AAAARGH!” Which I would imagine was probably a little disconcerting for my fellow nervous fliers. I mean, if I was on a plane and a kid started doing that, I’d be the one struggling to free myself from my seat belt and shouting, “THE LITTLE GIRL KNOWS SOMETHING! TURN THE PLANE AROUND”
As it was, I obviously didn’t “know something”, but every time I fly, I am burdened with the thought that I do. Every single time I get onto a plane I am overwhelmed with the certain knowledge that THIS IS HOW I AM GOING TO DIE, and I then get to pass an uncomfortable few hours wondering if I should, perhaps, tell someone about my “feeling”, my instinct that the flight is DOOMED, DOOMED I TELLS YA!
Incidentally, the fact that I have never yet been in a plane crash (or, indeed, had a particularly turbulent flight) does nothing to assuage my fears: all it proves is that it hasn’t happened yet, and by “it” I mean “the crash that will kill me.” It’s coming. I know it.
3. People who rub their feet together while wearing socks
I don’t think this one has a proper “phobia” name, so maybe it’s not a “proper” phobia, who knows. All I can tell you is that while the sight of someone rubbing their feet together while wearing socks doesn’t frighten me, the way crustaceans do, it does make me want to run out of the room screaming “STOP RUBBING YOUR FEET TOGETHER!” And sometimes I actually do. Sorry, dad. There’s just something about that “cotton on cotton” thing that just sets my teeth on edge (See also: wet towels, touching of) although, to be honest, bare feet rubbing together is almost as bad. Yeuch.
4. Actually, just socks in general, really
I hate almost everything about them. I will wear them when I absolutely have to (unlike crustaceans, unfortunately, they’re pretty hard to avoid), but I hate the look of them, and, more importantly, hate the feel of them on my feet. Just thinking about them makes me feel ill. This phobia has been ongoing for most of my life, and dates back to my early childhood, when I would reluctantly wear the socks my mum forced upon me, but would pull the toes off them away from my feet so that the socks ended up about 20 feet long, but at least didn’t come into contact with my toes. Urgh.
5. Being beheaded
Again, I’m not sure this counts as a “proper” phobia, because let’s face it – no one really enjoys a beheading, do they? Well, no one except Henry VIII, who doesn’t really count, on account of being dead and all. I do, however, have a horror of decapitation that makes me unable to read about it, see it in a movie or otherwise think about it without being seriously disturbed for quite a long time afterwards. In fact, I’m pretty sure I think about being beheaded far more than is really healthy. (Is there a particular amount of “thinking about being beheaded” time that IS healthy, though, I wonder?) Luckily this is not a scenario I’m ever likely to face, but as I type this, I’ve kind of tucked my neck down into my shoulders, tortoise style, and am contemplating having a stiff drink to get the horrible images out of my head…
6. Very deep water
Not just because it could contain crabs and other crustaceans, but because… well, because who knows WHAT it might contain? It’s also dark, creepy, and very far away from an environment in which we could actually survive, which is probably why I’m sitting here struggling for breath as I write this, with the thought of sinking ships and bodies of Very Deep Water at the forefront of my mind. It’s also the reason why flying across the Atlantic is a particularly mind bending experience for me…
ETA… Having written this a couple of days ago, I suddenly realised I’d missed out some of my biggest phobias completely. Because I am stupid, obviously. So, er, here they are…
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Tagged fear of crustaceans
Hi! Hello! Yes, it’s me, I’m still alive! It would be great if I had an actual, honest to God reason why I haven’t updated here for almost a week now, but, um, yeah, not so much, really. I mean, I’d love to be able to tell you that it’s because I was inundated with offers after my appearance on the Vanessa Feltz show, but clearly that’s just crazy talk, because actually last week looked a bit like this:
- Work – well, d’uh!
I’ve not particularly been enjoying work this week, because a) there’s been a lot of it and b) I’ve been working for a long time now, I’d kind of like to be able to just lie around the house now, eating Haribo Mix and reading trashy novels all day. Could someone maybe sort that out for me, please? Also, this week was Oscars Week, which meant that I spent an awful lot of it writing about what people were wearing, and there are only so many different ways you can say "red was popular this year" before your vision starts to glaze over and you find yourself thinking about the Haribo sweets and the trashy novels. You know?
- The Gym – at which I managed to pick up a "sports injury"
Yes, I did, I got me a "sports injury". I was actually quite proud of this because if any of the people who were at high school with me are reading this at the moment, they’re probably falling around laughing and saying, "Amber? Sports? No way!" (Well, obviously they’ll not be saying it exactly like that because, you know, they all used to call me "Spamhead McNaught" in those days. Yes.)
- Oh yeah, my sports injury!
It was a sore knee. I got it on the treadmill. I think I must have "pulled" something. I did it on Tuesday, and even although I knew it was stupid, I went back on Wednesday and ran on the treadmill again, and after that I couldn’t walk no more, the end.
- Taking Terry’s car to the garage. Yes, AGAIN.
It’s still making that whining noise, and to be honest, the frequent trips to the garage stopped being amusing about, ooooh, five trips ago, and now we just feel like we live there. Guess where we’re going tomorrow, for instance? Did you guess, "the garage"? Clever you!
- Listening to the crazy-ass weather throw the rubbish bins around the street
England had an earthquake, but up here, well, we just freakishly high winds, and all of the rubbish bins in the street ganged up and started doing the rounds of everyone’s gardens, blown by the crazy winds. It sucked. It’s March, you know: in like a lion, probably out like a lion too.
- Feeling grateful that my new dress actually fits me
So, yeah, that dress I was having made? Arrived. And fits like a glove. You know, with four fingers and a thumb on each side. No, I jest. It fits like a dress, which reassured me a little because, whew, turns out my waist is EXACTLY WHERE I THOUGHT IT WAS all along. The joy!
- Feeling depressed about it being March already.
Because the time, oh how it flies. And you know, last March, Terry and I got married. This March? Kind of sucks in comparison.
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