taking my own spin off of trancejen's entry about phobias and strange little things that ick you out in general, i present this.
i was a gymnast for many, many years. i had my feet handled all the time. practicing handstands? one coach i can recall in particular would (and still does) smack your feet if they weren't pointed tight enough. choreography? if you don't do the pose properly, the choreographer will mold you into it precisely as they intended - and if that means they have to grab your foot, then it gets grabbed. splits? bars? beam poses? poke, prod, touch. someone is always touching your feet. i do it to my kids now, without thinking about it - getting devon's feet to point is an ongoing project of monstrous proportions as her toes don't seem to curl. i'm not fucking kidding.
but i digress.
if you touch my feet now, i will go completely spastic, and i may in fact kick you in the teeth. carolyn used to do this when she either wanted me to get up (usually out of bed to go somewhere) or when she felt playful. sadly, this never resulted in the broken nose for her that would have made us even on account of the broken nose i got from the completely fucking random pillow fight.
i think the difference may have been in the fact that pointed toes make the foot too tense to register the icky squicky feeling of being touched. you start to lose sensation if you point hard enough.
don't even get me started about feet as a sexual entity. that is so fundamentally gross. when i hear people talk about toe-sucking and licking the inside of someone's foot - ugh! violent shudder* i can guarantee you, there would be no faster way to turn me off. not even in the bathtub, people. i don't care if they are as clean as clean can be - they are still TOES.
i'm reminded of a girl i knew in elementary school who would not look at bare feet and would actually get squicked out simply by the word "feet" or "toes". i can remember saying things like, "FEET, amy! lots of FEET, with all those TOES wigglng around ... " just to get her to go all squirmy and shrieky. waving bare feet around at sleepovers was also a great way to accomplish this. when we got older, she started to worry that her boyfriend would expect her to take her socks off during sex, or, even worse, would take off *his* socks. i didn't know her long enough to find out how that went.
/random babbling for today.