- I made it five days before I had to take the trash out, which is an inconvenient number! But okay.

- Anxiety is definitely a thing. And my instinct is to do something distracting "until it goes away," but of course that's not how it works... I'm working on noticing when I'm doing that and redirecting myself to things I actually want to do, but it's also not really a problem if I don't do anything but read and take care of basic needs in a given day.

- Someone I know from Tumblr has been doing daily art livestreams. They're in Australia but evening-in-Australia is bright and early in the morning here, so not missing the stream has been a good motivation to get up in the mornings. (You're welcome to come watch too!)

- I'm learning that Sparkly's taste in music-to-listen-to is not entirely the same as eir taste in music to play-on-the-piano. Sondheim apparently has too many picky details and not enough big dramatic parts (as compared to, say, Andrew Lloyd Webber). So now I'm trying to think of more dramatic songs I could ask em to play.

 Serious Wrestling Fan Friend had guests staying over tonight. Tomorrow they're driving back home and taking him with them for a long weekend. Saturday is (fingers crossed) our for-real-final moving out of stuff from the old apartment. 

I'm having a sort of weird thing happen re: moving stuff where rather than feeling more confident because we've done it successfully before, I instead feel like I'm pressing my luck, getting away with something, and the more times I do it the worse my chances get. So I'm having a small argument with my brain on that.

 Today I cleaned the toilet and the whole bathtub/shower area, put wart remover on my foot, and did a lot of thinking about my phobia and contamination-related anxiety. So none of that was exactly fun, but my tub is very clean! 

It's weird. My emetophobia stems from one specific thing that happened when I was in college, and it sort of partially overlaps with fear of contamination/germs, but I can remember having a tendency toward that kind of anxiety for a long time. Since I was maybe twelve years old? It never caused a significant disruption in my life, but the tendency to waaay overreact to "dangerous chemicals" / warnings not to touch things was definitely there. And I don't think there's any initial experience that caused that? I don't know. 

Today Sparkly was talking about a book ey read a while ago about ebola, and with that and dragonlady7 's post about the rise in black lung disease, I've been thinking about the various dangerous chemicals I worked with in high school and college and how surprising it is that I was never really scared of them. 

The thing is, in general I am very prone to contamination-related fears. My phobia includes a lot of that, and even when I was a kid, I remember several situations where I took some warning label way more seriously than it was meant to be taken, and was terrified of something that wasn't really dangerous at all (like getting anti-dandruff shampoo in my eyes.) I tend to be very aware of when my hands are (theoretically) "dirty" and what I touch with them.

But I've never felt afraid that way in a chemistry lab, even when I was objectively in way more danger than I ever was with household chemicals, despite the safety precautions we had in place-- and even the few times when I knew we weren't following a safety precaution that we should have, I wasn't really that scared.

The idea of having followed the safety precautions, I think, is really powerful by itself, and so is the example of other people around you being calm, and having authority figures calmly telling you to do things. 

Also I was taught things about warning labels (like how "caution," "warning," and "danger," I think it was, are meant as increasing levels of seriousness) that made them seem less scary, and the MSDSs that we used ("material safety data sheets", standardized forms for listing safety information about chemicals) have a lot more information than your average warning label, which lets you get a better idea of how serious the risk really is.

It also probably helped that there was a cognitive separation, if not really a complete physical one, between lab and home. Like, professionals in actual labs have even more of a separation, they wear lab coats that get laundered separately from their street clothes to even further minimize the risk of spreading stuff around. And I never had a designated lab pen, I would use pens to write in my lab notebook with my gloved hands and put them right back in my general pool of pens, which could conceivably have transferred tiny traces of something. But just the fact that it was a separate physical space, and the idea that you take off your gloves, take off your goggles, and go home and stop thinking about acids, helped me not worry about that. 

It's kind of strange to think about. It is entirely possible for me to avoid the contamination-fear, but the solution isn't necessarily directly related to the things that objectively make me more safe.

I have mixed feelings about the kind of writing I do here (and on the previous incarnation of this blog.) I usually manage to write as if I'm just talking to myself, without having an audience in mind, and that's a good thing because it means I get a lot more stuff written down than I otherwise would, and most of it is reasonably intelligible to people other than me, which is also nice. The problem is that I haven't actually found any kind of happy medium between thinking out loud and spending multiple drafts considering how my writing will sound to other people.

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