confessions of a ridiculous person
If I could have my way, I would confine my encounters with post and politics to reading birthday cards and webofevil.
My aversion to the post is so extreme that one might guess I had spent a childhood as an indentured servant made to lick mountains of envelopes, or that my mailbox administered electric shocks. In truth, what terrifies me about post is the weight of expectation that it comes with: whether it's to pay another extortionate yet unexpected bill from my council, respond to urgent queries, send (and locate!) obscure haunting documents from Home Office or Institutions of Higher Learning, or deal with the haunting guilt of not responding to my pen-pals speedily enough (if at all). The postal service is as a long ode to my failure, interspersed here and there with bittersweet memories of my grandmother and the increasingly unreadable letters she wrote me when I moved to England, each of which began with "This is surely the last letter I will write to you, because I will die soon."
Post and its pushers terrify me, but it remains inescapable (down to the fact that two of my neighbours are postmen, which doesn't seem to increase the frequency of the right post actually getting delivered to my address), forcing me to engage in elaborate rituals of avoidance and confrontation, wrapped in futility and stapled with anxiety. The weight of unopened envelopes with Generally Threatening Contents is heavy on my conscience, and afixes me with its humorless malevolent eye every single time I exit the front door (to outwit it, I haven't left the house in two days).
The only thing guaranteed to raise my blood pressure higher than encounters with mail are encounters with current events. Therefore I don't watch the news, I spurn broadsheets, I immerse myself in reality television - and largely this works well for me, as I drift through the world in a state of what I would like to consider as benign ignorance.
However, despite my efforts, the real world frequently breaks through and (as last Friday) I find myself googling news sites attempting to discover why an angry mob and a Police Presence are congregated not far from my office shouting in a lively but disconcerting manner. (It was something to do with the Iranian elections, as it turned out. Although why they had picked as the focal point for the frenzy an Iranian Corner Shop I suspect I will never find out).
What is your most ridiculous phobia?
My aversion to the post is so extreme that one might guess I had spent a childhood as an indentured servant made to lick mountains of envelopes, or that my mailbox administered electric shocks. In truth, what terrifies me about post is the weight of expectation that it comes with: whether it's to pay another extortionate yet unexpected bill from my council, respond to urgent queries, send (and locate!) obscure haunting documents from Home Office or Institutions of Higher Learning, or deal with the haunting guilt of not responding to my pen-pals speedily enough (if at all). The postal service is as a long ode to my failure, interspersed here and there with bittersweet memories of my grandmother and the increasingly unreadable letters she wrote me when I moved to England, each of which began with "This is surely the last letter I will write to you, because I will die soon."
Post and its pushers terrify me, but it remains inescapable (down to the fact that two of my neighbours are postmen, which doesn't seem to increase the frequency of the right post actually getting delivered to my address), forcing me to engage in elaborate rituals of avoidance and confrontation, wrapped in futility and stapled with anxiety. The weight of unopened envelopes with Generally Threatening Contents is heavy on my conscience, and afixes me with its humorless malevolent eye every single time I exit the front door (to outwit it, I haven't left the house in two days).
The only thing guaranteed to raise my blood pressure higher than encounters with mail are encounters with current events. Therefore I don't watch the news, I spurn broadsheets, I immerse myself in reality television - and largely this works well for me, as I drift through the world in a state of what I would like to consider as benign ignorance.
However, despite my efforts, the real world frequently breaks through and (as last Friday) I find myself googling news sites attempting to discover why an angry mob and a Police Presence are congregated not far from my office shouting in a lively but disconcerting manner. (It was something to do with the Iranian elections, as it turned out. Although why they had picked as the focal point for the frenzy an Iranian Corner Shop I suspect I will never find out).
What is your most ridiculous phobia?