I have a very sensitive soul, and I can rarely bring myself to do things like kill spiders or bugs without just cause. This deep, inextricable sissiness, combined with the intellectual maturity of a younger me, lead to some pretty odd behaviors that went largely unobserved. I had many stuffed animals and other vaguely anipomorphic (50 hits on Google, good enough) objects in my room as a child. Somehow I always felt their cold, beady and/or buttony eyes on me, and so always had to leave my room and go to the bathroom to change. Middle school gym class was quite a shock to me.
Even stranger: when I first started using a word processor to type papers and other things for school, I felt inexplicably bad about deleting letters. I don't know what it was, but I started getting into the habit of just copying and pasting unwanted text to the end of the document and only printing out the first n-1 pages to spare the poor unwanted letters' lives. When I upgraded from my AppleIIe to a proper PC with Word on it, editing and formatting became a lot easier, so I was sometimes compelled to be even more creative in my Schindler-esque efforts. Because I felt sad about banishing the letters to the lonely last page ghetto, a began to cut/paste them into a separate word document where they all lived and could be happy among their own kind. I remember being nervous about that, wondering if the cut/paste function was somehow deleting the letter and putting a copy of it at the target destination instead of preserving the essence of the letter. (Funnily enough, we spent an entire week on this subject in my Metaphysics class ten years later.) The height of the absurdity, I think, was when I would keep the string of unused letters just in front of the cursor in my document, and would drop them off in new words where appropriate. Foster words for the abandoned letters.
I honestly don't remember what broke me of these odd habits. I know I accidentally included the strings of gibberish when turning in my assignment a few times, and I remember one horrific accident where I must have hit the 'insert' button on my keyboard and I overwrote a whole two lines of them. I think the stress of writing papers in high school just made me more comfortable with the idea that letters are were my little slaves, and that I could deal with them as I wished.
