For some reason, lately I’ve been thinking of some of the weird neuroses I have:
1) For some reason, I have this bizarre problem with wasting food. None of my family (that I’m aware of) dealt with starvation in the past, and none of my parents or grandparents ever gave me the whole “starving kids in China” routine as a kid. If I didn’t like something, they never made me eat it, and they didn’t make me feel guilty for it. Yet, whenever I see food being wasted, it drives me nuts. Specifically, it really bothers me when food is wasted purely for entertainment. Remember the scene in the movie PCU when the pranksters stole a huge vat of ground beef and dropped it onto the animal rights activists? Or when Late Night with Jimmy Fallon does the “hot dog toss” game, where audience members try tossing the most hot dogs through the mouth of a celebrity cut out? It drives me crazy. I don’t know why. And lest you think it’s some claptrap about precious animals dying to make food, I used to have no problem tossing the tomato slice that comes with most hamburgers to the side… until one day around 5 years ago, when I thought about that poor tomato growing in a field, hoping to one day be the most delicious tomato in the world… only to wind up, uneaten, in a Dumpster behind a Wendy’s in Belmont. It made me sad and guilty, so now I eat the tomato. Intellectually, I know that there’s plenty of food to eat in this country, but wasting it just bothers me. Badly. Amusingly, however, this specific neurosis doesn’t apply to leftovers. I guess if I’ve already eaten some of it, then I have less guilt about throwing it away… or something.
2) I’m not entirely sure how to describe this… but I have a certain… empathy for cute things, especially things created for children. The best way to describe it is like this: one day I was flipping through an issue of Wired magazine and came across this article about whether robots will one day deserve their own rights. The author specifically mentions Tickle Me Elmo, and how disturbed he was to see videos on YouTube of people dousing Elmo in gasoline and igniting him, then laughing out loud as Elmo giggled away while being burnt to death. This article was reassuring, as I thought for years that I was the only one out there that found such things sick and disturbing. But while the author of the Wired essay goes on to talk about how robots might one day need rights to protect themselves from humans, I went back to my childhood and thought about such things as logos and coloring books. For some reason, it’s always bothered me to see “cute” images destroyed, and I don’t know why. When I was very young – just young enough to be able to use those safety scissors without Mom freaking out – I would cut the cute logos off used food packages instead of having them end up in the county dump. Just the thought of, say the cat from the PetMeds.com ads ending up in a pile of garbage makes me sad. I really really wish I knew why. It all reminds me of a line from a P.J. O’Rourke book, where he talks about being in a revolutionary gang in the 1960s, and how they broke in to a city office building and proceeded to trash it. The “leader” of the group just stood there, slack-jawed, while everyone else knocked stuff over, smashed it with hammers, sprayed painted it, etc. O’ Rourke said something along the lines of “the man hated the system as much as anyone, but still had that childlike belief that beautiful things shouldn’t be destroyed for no good reason”. I guess that’s me.