Advanced Techniques In Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Some Things I Don't Like:
- Birds
- Dolphins
- Escalators
- When a drop of water falls right in the part of my hair
- Most preparations of shrimp
- Swimming in natural bodies of water
- Anything anise-flavored
- Math
- When the seam of my sock touches the wrong part of my toes
- Ham/Roast Beef/Most meats served at holiday dinners
- Holiday dinners
- Birthday dinners
- Any dinners with large groups of people
- Okay, just FUCK YOU, Dinner
- Heavy Metal
- Most animal print apparel
- Jerry Maguire
- Going to the bathroom on any sort of moving vessel (what if it crashes/sinks while you're in there, and THAT'S WHERE YOU DIE???)
- Talking on the phone
- The month of February

There's a lot more (just wait), but those are the biggies. I've learned how to handle the majority - even the Top Three, the Phobias. Birds, I pretty much have to encounter in my everyday life, be it pigeons or cardinals or G's mean parrot, they're there. And I'm making progress: the first night the mean parrot came to live with G, I refused to go inside and stayed on the porch all night. Now, even when he MIMICS MY LAUGH - even though it makes my heart jackhammer and my breath stick in my lungs - I can at least stay in the room. Although I still don't like to keep my back to him.

Escalators, too. I used to take the stairs at the fucking Kendall T stop rather than dealing with that mountain of escalators. In DC, there is rarely a stair option, so I just had to suck it up and deal. Even if I do keep the ends of my scarf or my skirt balled up in my hands while I ride. And dolphins have, thus far, never been an issue.

Most of the other shit, I can just avoid. Don't bother trying to eat stuff I know I hate just in case I've 'acquired the taste'. Buy the right socks, don't jump in the water, don't over-hydrate on the plane. But February...ugh. There is nothing I can do about February.

It happens the same way every year. December was great, the first part of January was nice, getting back to a normal schedule, sleeping a little more. But then I start to get bored again. And then it starts to get cold. Really cold. I hate being cold. Even just a little cold. I'm so intolerant to it that I used to think that I got colder than everyone else, like it was a measurable issue of blood-temperature. I believed that until a few years ago when my brother said: "I don't think you get colder than other people. I think you're just really, really bad at being cold." Which is fine, and probably true, but it still doesn't keep the cold from filling me with any less despair. Yes, despair. Compounded by the creeping awareness that things, in late January begin to go slightly awry. Nothing to really worry about yet, just...things aren't right.

Then, as January hisses out its final frigid death rattles and rolls over into February, everything goes to shit. You lose someone important. You lose something important. All you've got is square pegs and the entire world turns into a series of round holes. It's not like you can take a long walk to soothe yourself, it's so fucking cold. You don't even want to walk down to your friend's house, it's SO COLD. Forget taking the train across town. And there's nothing to look forward to. Nothing. Here is another list:

Things I Don't Look Forward To In February*:

February 2nd. Groundhog Day: February is chock full of stupid holidays, this being the chronologically first. Why are we still doing this? Waiting on an enormous rodent to come out of a hole? Any other day of the year, this would be cause to call an exterminator. Also, it's incredibly boring. At least jazz it up a little. Like, what if we took four raccoons, named them shit like 'Prosperity', 'Peace In the Middle East', 'Swine Flu' and 'Locust Plague', then hid a bag of cookies in the bottom of a dumpster, filled the dumpster with trash, and let the raccoons loose on it in the middle of the night. Whichever raccoon gets to the cookies first, that's what's in the Global Forecast for the year. That, I would watch**.

February 14th. Valentine's Day: Oh, come on, like you're surprised I hate Valentine's Day? Honestly, I don't hate the concept of it at all. St. Valentine marrying illegal Christian couples in secrecy so the Romans wouldn't throw them to the lions...I love that, that's great. Love's cool! Everyone should be able to get married! If that's what we were celebrating, dude, I'm down. But in practice, modern V-Day is mean. That's all there is to it. It's a mean, mean holiday where there's all this pressure to impress, or outperform, or 'find someone', and that's too much to put on everyone on the middle of fucking February, so the whole country just ends up binge eating half-price Whitman's Samplers and candy hearts on the 15th. I won't be part of that, I just won't. I hate seeing everyone get so worked up.

February 18th, President's Day: You'd think I'd be all about this one, because I get a day off work. And yeah, that's pretty okay. Mostly I just think this holiday is stupid because I don't really understand it, and that apostrophe situation doesn't help. Is this a holiday for all the presidents? Just Lincoln and Washington? Is this a day that belongs to all the presidents? In any of those cases, the apostrophe should be somewhere else, or non-existent, right? The only way this works is if this is one day belonging to one individual president, yes? So who is it? I hate that I obsess over this EVERY STUPID FEBRUARY.

I know, I know. Self-fulfilling prophecy much? I tell myself this all the time. But February is still, always,
a pile of crap. But, at the very least, this year I'm going to try and deal with it. Because it's inevitable, and because, like all those other things on the list, I can probably figure it out. If you'd told me two years ago I could be in the same room as a bright green bird who copied laughter...man. I'll figure it out.***

I've still got nothing on that whole 'water drops on my part' thing, though, so ideas welcome there.


*NOT TO HATE on any of my wonderful friends with February birthdays, this is absolutely nothing against you, I love you. You're not responsible for February. 
**And of course, I will always always watch the shit out of the movie 'Groundhog Day'. That's just the shit.
**And please do not give me any of that 'but at least it's the shortest month!' stuff. Are you familiar with February? Two more days of February and the world would end. It has to be that short. For like, the survival of the species.