Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Strange Associations

It's funny how we unconsciously carry some of our childish understandings well into adulthood. I think it was about 3rd or 4th grade when my PE class had a health lesson on drugs and that was probably the first time I heard of steroids. I guess that maybe Nurse Lawson was telling us about how steroids made muscles get bigger and I assumed that a steroid was something that looked kinda like a muscle. Since then, for some strange reason, when I hear the word steroids, I get a mental image of something that looks kinda like cracklins or pieces of beef jerky. I'm sure I'd taken medicine by that point and I don't associate other drugs in pill form with any type of food but even now, when I hear the word steroid, I picture cracklins or beef jerky! Strange, I know...

Here is another one: For a long time I thought that if you blew your nose and flushed it down the toilet, it would mess up the plumbing. I know where I got this one. When we lived in Crowley, we lived out of town so we had a septic tank. I remembered dad had to 'dig out' the septic tank a few times--certainly not one of his favorite activities--so after one of those times, he gave us firm instructions to be careful about how much we flush down the toilet. He gave the example that, if you blow your nose, throw the tissue in the trash can instead of flushing it. I realize that it was because he didn't want extra stuff in the tank but at the time I made a connection between snot and plumbing problems. It wasn't until college that I put two-and-two together...I didn't go around telling people that snot clogged the pipes, but I realized that that I subconsciously held that belief (more specifically, that the bacteria in the plumbing would maybe feed on the snot and somehow make some kind of mess that would clog the pipes--that was actually the whole belief that I held on the subject!) Yeah, I guess I had a bit of an imagination! ;) Did anyone else do this?

3 comments:

Jessica said...

When I hear the song "You are my sunshine" I instantly think of Ketchup and Mustard. I don't know what that's about.

That's pretty funny about steroid cracklins though.

Chuchey Dradey said...

When I was a kid, we had a highway, the business route that went through the main part of town. We had the other part of the highway that went around town and it was called the bipass. The bipass cooincidentally had an overpass, to go over another highway and then an immediate underpass to go under the railroad tracks. Until I was somewhere in my driving years or right before, I always thought it was the bipass because it had an underpass and an overpass right together.

Thankyouverymuch.

Anonymous said...

That's so weird...