Michele’s Freeminding

About food obsessions, I can’t drink in a bottle I have been drinking in more than 30 minutes ago. I think about the bacterial multiplication occuring in the bottle and that makes me feel disguted.

I also have an obsession about keeping my hands clean, I cannot stand to have my hands dirty for more than 30 seconds. When I cook, I wash my hands everytime, compulsively. Same thing when gardening, it’s very hard for me to handle having some soil on my hands. When I take the subway or the bus and I have to stand, I never put my hands on the metallic bars. I had a few accidents because of that, but, oh well, I’d rather have a broken arm than a dirty hand.

About that number 3 obsession, I keep looking at the time on the clock when it is near 3h14 and 15 seconds. I always wonder if something would happen when the time was exactly PI. That is stupid because PI on a clock would be more like 3h08 and 28 seconds, and well, because nothing will be happening!

Chinese people are very obsessed about numbers in general. I have visited many temples where a lot of thing were following some rational distribution, where on a circular floor, made of many rows of bricks, when you divided the number of bricks from one row to another, you would always get 3…well or something like that. Chinese are also obsessed about number 8 which means luck. They try to get the more number 8 everywhere they can, on their car plate, on their phone number, etc. There are so many numbers that goes like 11 00 88 88 88 88. Because 8 in chinese if a flat “ba”, it sounds like “bababa-babababa” when you pronounce it.

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Oops I forgot two things after reading Vincent’s post.

1) Every now and then I like watching the clock when it turns 12:34 56 seconds. I’ve always liked how it was 1,2,3,4,5,6 at that time of the day.

2) In reference to the Chinese, there have been phone numbers that sold for ridiculous prices because they contained these numbers. Here is a blog post about it. Some guy bought a cell phone number for US$1.1 million and an airline bought an 8888 8888 number for US$280,000.

I can’t think of many obessesions or maybe I don’t see them. I have few like I wash my hands every other minute when cooking. I always check the time on the clock and every day I see the time showing 11 minutes after which happens more then twice a day. Pretty scary I always wonder what it is with the 11 minutes.

I took a folklore class when I was at Berkeley and the professor (who, I should add, was a freudian) explained that in most interpretations of the use of the number 3 in folklore it represented the ‘Triad’, meaning the male genitalia. According to his theory it was used to create an symbolic male dominance in the stories.

Well, I don’t know about that but here’s something freaky for your reading pleasure: I was the third child born at 3:33 in the morning of 9/21 (multiples of 3)