Quarantine!

hy·po·chon·dri·a/ˌhīpəˈkändrēə/    (oh, doesn't IPA look cool?)

Noun:

Abnormal anxiety about one's health.The persistent conviction that one is or is likely to become ill, often involving symptoms when illness is neither present nor likely, and persisting despite reassurance and medical evidence to the contrary.

(Thanks google definitions. Obsessive need to cite all sources regardless of how anonymous they are.)
It's true: I can be a bit of a hypochondriac. I'm not a germophobe - when picking up that ancient jellybean from under my dresser, I have no qualms about sticking it in my mouth and eating it. "I've got a young, strong immune system. I'll be fine," I tell myself confidently as my teeth work through the hardened sugar. As soon as I get a nose bleed though, or a headache, or a momentary pain in my lower back, my faith in my body's defenses flies out the window: Leukemia! Brain aneurysm! Kidney stones! I'm dying! It's one of the many reasons I will never be a medical doctor. (Others include perpetually shaky hands, squeamishness, a fondness for regular sleep and a terrible bedside manner.)
Obviously hypochondria can be an actual psychological problem. And obviously it can be a very annoying tendency. But it's also kind of funny. Sure, when you're freaking out at 3 in the morning that the weird twinge in your back is actually spinal cancer, it doesn't seem that funny. But I tend to lack a sense of humour when suffering insomnia (worst discovery of all time: there is a - really ridiculously rare - genetic disorder that causes people to actually die of being unable to sleep. How am I supposed to get to sleep knowing that? ). With a little bit of sleep though...it's funny in the way all our little neuroses are funny if we look at them objectively.
My illness fears were a lot stronger when I was little. I blame it on being an early and precocious reader. A children's history of Toronto that I read in Grade 2 or 3 may have sparked a long-lasting love of history but it also sparked an almost equally long-lasting horror of polio. There was something terribly vivid about the description of the experience of being stuck in an iron lung that caught my paranoid imagination. I started to read the newspaper at about the same age and quickly discovered a whole new host of ailments in the Health section. I was also fond of stories about pioneer girls in which there was always someone dying of typhoid or cholera or blood poisoning. Then I found out about Black Plague.
"It doesn't exist anymore, Charlotte. That was hundreds of years ago."
"But sometimes monkeys still get it. And this one woman in the US got it and died."
I was kind of a strange kid. Clearly, it wasn't just  the reading - I was also naturally anxious and simultaneously completely horrified and a little bit fascinated by death. I refused to go past the wolf enclosure at the zoo after I heard my parents saying that one of the wolves had died. I also read obituaries (ok, I read everything. I even read the sports section when I was little.)
While diseases like polio, cholera and the Black Death were pretty remote from my modern life, the media provided several front page stories tailor-made to freak out the young and paranoid. There was West Nile Virus. There was Mad Cow Disease (alright, fine, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) - particularly horrifying to me because of emotional news reports about people who couldn't remember their families. I lived in Toronto when the whole city was panicking about SARS. My Girl Guide camp was cancelled because our leaders were nurses and had to work crazy overtime hours.
At some point between the end-ish of elementary and the beginning-ish of junior high, I mostly got over my biggest fears of illness. Maybe I just learned to take myself less seriously. Maybe I got busy enough that I didn't have to analyze every little ache and pain. I still anxiously check my moles to make sure I'm not getting skin cancer. I still feel a spark of panic when my joints feel odd, when I find a weird splotch on my neck. But it's funny now. Sort of. And I like to think there are certain fringe benefits to paranoia. I may have higher blood pressure from anxiety, but I'm unlikely to let undiagnosed symptoms develop into something terrible. I'm unlikely to let myself get obese or go to the tanning salon or take up smoking. Plus, the stories of weird little fears can be exploited to produce new blog material.

A Different Lens on Life?

I know it's supposed to be a good thing to put yourself in someone else's shoes. As in, have some empathy and try to see the world through another person's point of view. But what about putting yourself in your shoes' shoes? Is my tendency to imagine what it would be like to be an inanimate object a sign of insanity? Consumer culture run horribly amok? Or just a very strange kind of empathy?
I read a book when I was little about the life of a doll and all the different girls who played with her over time. (Can google help me once again? Victory! It's called Hitty, Her First Hundred Years. In case you were wondering.) Alright, a doll at least looks like a person. But I like to think about what it would be like to be a phone and listen to everyone's conversations. Or a house and watch people's lives. Or a pair of shoes, feeling all kinds of different ground, new types of dirt and gravel. Would a person's feet feel like completeness or oppression?
Like a lot of people, my most emotional relationships with inanimate objects are with clothes. Wow. That sounded very weird. I don't talk to my clothes. Not anywhere near as much as I yell at my computer. Although sometimes I dance with them while I'm putting laundry away. But I digress. Actually, I think this is mostly a girl thing (although what do I know? I've never been a guy. Possibly there are hoards of men who know the grief I felt when my pink flare pants went to the secondhand store when I outgrew them in Grade 2). Clothes are some kind of weird embodiment of us. If you (like me) live in a climate with a 6 month winter you can recognize your friends 100 meters away by their winter coats. You think carefully about what to wear to a job interview or a first date because your clothes are supposed to say something about who you are. A piece of clothing can embody a phase of your life (school uniform, all black wardrobe, prom dress). I can think of several scenes in books where women stand in front of their closets pondering their clothing as a reflection of an ended relationship. Clothing sits next to your skin. It absorbs your sweat and your soup spills, blots your tears, and cleans your glasses lenses.
Which brings me to what I actually meant to write about (believe it or not, I didn't really intend to wax poetical about the power of clothing). Glasses. Of all the inanimate objects I imagine the lives of, glasses are my favourite. I was thinking about this because as I was unpacking moving boxes last week, I came across the glasses cases that hold all my old pairs of glasses. I am easily sidetracked. I tried on all the old pairs of glasses: the red wire-framed children's glasses from when I first became bespectacled in Grade 6, the black pair with tiny rhinestones half fallen out, the swirl armed burgundy pair that encircled my eyes up until a year ago.
It looks very strange to see yourself in the mirror in your old glasses. It's like temporarily reverting to whatever age you were when you wore those frames. And then you wonder (if you're me) whether you're seeing the world the way you did when you wore those frames. Just through the power of having put them back on. The reason I'm fascinated by imagining the life of my glasses is that my lenses have seen almost everything that I've seen. Those are the glasses that looked at my first time table in junior high. Those are the glasses that first saw the my high school locker. Those are the glasses that read my high school diploma exams. My sister pointed out that my lenses have steadily got larger - I'd like to see that as a metaphor for a broadening outlook on the world. All of this is, of course, ridiculously whimsical and silly. The size of your glasses means nothing. But physical switches between pairs of glasses as the years run by is a nice metaphor for me about the ever-changing lens through which I see the world. (That's one thing you can say for putting your head inside the heads of objects without heads. It gives you piles of metaphors.)
Wondering whether my flip-flops are smiling at me or grimacing,
Charlotte