odd behaviors

A while back my brother and I dropped by a fast food place. The restaurant was not busy, so the guy behind the cashier was occupying himself, it appeared, by licking the screen of his computer.

"Are you licking that screen?" I asked him, once his head had popped up over the counter.

"No," he said. "I was trying to see if I could press the buttons with my nose."

Well, why not? Heck, the same question has often occured to me. What else is there to be thinking about in a stultifyingly boring profession, especially after you've already run through the ordinary gamut of thoughts? My heart warmed to the fellow. He was an odd fellow--like me.

Anyway, it does make one rather wonder what other odd things people are up to when they think no one's looking. We've all seen the one-way mirror trick on TV, where some hapless person peers into what he or she thinks is a mirror to check their teeth, adjust their underpants, or look up their own noses. But of course, that stuff is mundane compared to pressing buttons with your nose.

I remember now all sorts of difficult-to-explain fixes my friends used to get into way back when we were in high school. Like the guy who stuffed a bean up his nose to gross out a friend, but then it got stuck....he ended up trying to inhale it back the other way, until finally it came out his mouth. (His friend was very grossed out.)

Or the time my friend H. was changing her gym clothes inside one of the stalls of the girls' bathroom because she was too embarrassed to change out in the open, and accidentally dropped her underwear into the toilet. Since she couldn't exactly wear them again after that, and she didn't want anyone witnessing her leaving the stall with a pair of wet underwear, she decided to flush them down the toilet instead (but of course!). Unfortunately the panties refused to flush and the toilet jammed, flooding the entire girls' locker room.

But the good news is that by the time anyone figured out the cause of that event, she was long gone, and thus was spared personal humiliation, which is the important thing.

Then there was the particularly odd story of one of my classmates when I was an undergrad--not a friend, exactly, more of a friend of a friend. She appeared to class one day wearing an eye patch. She claimed she had had a brain tumor, and that she had had to undergo some horrific surgical procedure wherein the doctors removed her eyeball in order to get through her skull to remove the malignancy. We were all horrified, of course, and she received much attention and sympathy....until it came out that no such procedure existed. Nor had she ever had the tumor. She had been wearing an eye-patch around....just because.

So--people are weird. Much weirder than we can ever suspect on the surface. What other secret things do seemingly normal people do that they'd be absolutely mortified to have anyone discover? You know they're doing them. You just wonder what it is they're up to.