Chapter 1: Social Problems

Okay, I’m all about letting people know that you are uncanny right off the bat. I don’t always do it, but I have nothing against admitting to some eccentricities should they come up in the first couple of days after meeting. I am a texture eater and some people find that odd and there is a new girl at work who did find it odd. Especially because she forced me to eat a piece of dried fruit…which grosses me out not because of the taste but because of jellybean like texture that the fruit takes on. I ate a piece, nibble by nibble and couldn’t help gagging almost every time. I leaned over to explain that the taste was fine but the gagging reflex came from the texture. She nodded like she would try to understand that for me. I couldn’t finish the piece though and had to leave the room to “make a phone call” and secretly destroy the remains of whatever it was I was eating. I was told I was a little bit weird and I told her that I only get weirder the more you find out about me.
To me it is okay to be weird, as long as it doesn’t involve physical contact with anyone, you can be as idiosyncratic as you like as long as you don’t touch me. Eventually you can evolve to the physical contact stage of a relationship, but you don’t do it the second time you work with someone. You still stick to verbal weirdness and odd behavior. The physical contact just makes people feel uncomfortable, there is such a thing as being too friendly. Is this making sense?
I guess what I am getting at is that people sometimes hold back their true personality for fear that they will scare other people away, and I have come to a point in my life where I no longer care if I scare them away (mostly due to the fact that I am currently meeting people who lack the capacity to run away from me a.k.a. coworkers). However, I don’t make them feel uncomfortable, at least to my knowledge. I keep my distance; I just don’t hide who I am. I encourage all people to express themselves and show their true personality right away; just don’t get all touchy with people. Maybe it’s just me, maybe if people get touchy with me too soon a red light goes up and I no longer want to be their friend, where as five minutes before they started to lean on me, play footsie with me, elbow me, I would have thought they were pretty cool. I’m just not really a physical contact kind of girl I suppose. Maybe other people don’t mind physical body language; maybe to them it means that they have just made a new best friend. To me it means I have met yet another person who is going to have leech like characteristics when we are in the same room together.
I don’t know if that makes any sense to anyone else but it just kind of bothers me. Basically all I’m getting at is the new girl at work was cool for about half an hour, but then after she found out about my odd eating habits she started to pull out her weirdness. She kept leaning against me and hitting my foot and pretty much just bugging me.
As I have said before though, after a certain probationary period it may or may not be okay for you to have physical contact with me. For instance my parents and siblings are allowed to hug me, but many of my extended family are not, I just don’t know them that well. Certain people at work whether they know it or not are in fact allowed to touch me, while others just creep me out. It’s not that I don’t like those people (in some cases that is true), but there’s something that makes it seem weird if they try to give me a hug.