I consider myself a logical, rational person most of the time; however, all logic goes out the window when it involves random, inanimate objects on my floor. My first reaction is not, “Oh, that’s a piece of fuzz. Let me pick it up.”
No.
When I discover an inanimate object laying on my floor that was not there before, my initial reaction is almost always one of terror.
I also give the inanimate object a very strange name in the moment. “Oh my goodness! What the hell is that?! It’s a FLIFFERFLOOJAVNAB!” It takes either somebody nearby to bring me back to reality, or a few minutes for my adrenaline to settle down and me to logically work out that a Flifferfloojavnab is both not a word and not a dangerous creature.
This has pretty much been the way I have handled random objects on my floor since I can remember. When I was little, everything was a black widow.
“Mom! Come quick! It’s a black widow!”
“No, honey. That’s your dog’s fur.”
“Mom! This time it’s really a black widow!”
“No. That’s just a piece of fuzz.”
“Mom!!!!! Mom!!! I swear this time it IS A BLACK WIDOW!!!”
“No. That’s just a chip.”
The older I became, the easier it was for me to accept that maybe my mother was right and not every unidentifiable, creepy object was a black widow, but not being able to classify everything as a black widow actually created more fear and anxiety. This opened the door for the possibility that the unidentified object in question might even be scarier than a black widow — perhaps even something yet to be identified by biologists. So I started giving the creepy objects my own names. (I’m actually less cognitively in control of the weird names I now gift these strange objects than I would like to admit. They just pop out of my mouth or pop into my mind during my initial fear-based reaction.)
Sometimes I put a glass over the object if I am home alone and can’t bear to figure out what it really is. Sometimes I will scream, and when I scream, I will scream out the weird name I have given it.
Here are some examples of what I have found on my floor recently:
What It Actually Was: A piece of cardboard
What It Actually Was: A piece of purple fluff from my new purple fluffy socks
What It Actually Was: Some black string
What it Actually Was: A pink button
What It Actually Was: Either a piece of cat poop or a chocolate chip
I used gloves to finally pick it up after it spent half a day under a glass.
I am almost 40 years old, so I think this is just how I’m going to live the rest of my life.
I suppose I could also have Edward Sucky (the robot vacuum) deal with it, but Edward is, unfortunately, in the wrong profession. He means well, I think, but he is not very good at vacuuming. I do have a human-operated vacuum and use it frequently as well, in addition to Edward “helping” keep things under control. Since 2015, a third cat came to live with us, Hobbes (who probably also hates inflatable unicorn horns), exponentially increasing the amount of cat hair to deal with, so vacuuming often is a must.
Update: Just as I’m going to bed, after the floors are freshly vacuumed from earlier today, I find this in the kitchen:
I could not bring myself to pick it up, because for all we know it could be a Shivitripit, and that sounds like something super dangerous.
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