"We are all different!" - "No, I am not!"

One good thing about blogs is that they give you extra data points about how similar or how different you are from other people in various aspects. I usually find it difficult to access the ectent of similarities or differences by guessing. I tend to assume most people are in most aspects quite similar to me and get rather surprised when I run into an exception to this rule.

I mean, of course I know where I stand in relation to most people in most ways that are either very visible or very commonly quantified, such as age, height, weight, intelligence, salary, education level, breast size, hair color, etc., and now - bless the Net - know that some people share my sexual fetishes, but I often wonder about many other things that people don't talk about because they just are not that important. How many people get moments of extremely violent rage like I described in the previous entry? How many people strongly prefer rye bread to any other kinds? How many people sometimes see something that looks like lightning when they close their eyes? How many people configure their desktop so that focus follows mouse? How many people throw up if they try to read in a moving car? How many people are paranoid about getting pregnant? How many people have some hairs that turn gray and then turn dark again?

The most amazing discovery so far has been that apparently very few people can get very sharp bursts of a very pleasurable sensation in their necks by stimulating some particular nerves in their hands and arms. Before I wrote that entry I assumed everyone could do it. Then I wrote it and it turned out almost nobody knew what I was talking about.