Every so often I’ll read a con­fes­sion on grouphug.us that will make me think of one of my friends, as if he or she may have been the one to write the it. And even more rarely, I’ll read one that makes me think that I wrote it, even though I know I did­n’t, and this is one of them:

270642834: i wear my retain­er, even when i don’t have to, cuz it makes me feel nerdy, and nerds turn me on.

For some rea­son, I can’t stand any­thing that has to do with eye injuries. I have no idea why. During movies, the only thing that will usu­al­ly make me look away is an eye gouge, or an eye stab, or an eye pluck. Things like that dis­gust me so much that I can’t even write about them.

So Wheaties has this fish with an infec­tion on its left eye. The infec­tion looks like a fun­gus, but it isn’t a nor­mal blotchy mold, it’s a white growth that comes out in sharp spikes. At one point the spikes were longer than the width of its head, and it was float­ing side­ways because it prob­a­bly could­n’t see out of that eye. It’s not so much the fact that the fish has an eye infec­tion (although that’s bad enough already), but the fact that the infec­tion seems so devi­ous­ly struc­tured, almost intel­li­gent, with these long, sharp spikes that jut out direct­ly from the eye. All I can pic­ture is try­ing to cure the fish by putting some med­i­cine in there, and the spikes going limp and falling off, or hav­ing to pull off each spike indi­vid­u­al­ly with pair of tweez­ers. Every time I pass by the aquar­i­um I don’t dare look. Just think­ing about it lit­er­al­ly gives me the shiv­ers. Must be the sin­gle most dis­gust­ing thing I’ve ever seen.