During my birthday party a few weeks ago, my mother stood up and made an unscheduled and unscripted speech. I'm certain she did it just to embarrass me.

On the other hand, she's turning 68 this year. Senility might be setting in. (Hi, Mom).

In any case she proceeded to tell everybody how my cranium was so large the obstetrician was forced to wrench me out of her cervix using forceps. She ended the enthralling tour of her cervix by telling everybody that forceps delivery usually results in brain damage, and how relieved she was that I turned out "'normal".

But am I? Normal, that is? I have discovered over the years that I am either blessed or cursed with an acute tendency to worry about things that do not bother most people. For instance, whenever I fly, I get sick to the pit of my tummy imagining that the last call the pilot received was his wife telling him she's leaving him for a 2m-tall Nigerian bloke called Jombo.

That's the kind of thing that makes pilots miss runways during landing.

And when I cross a one-way street, I'm that guy who keeps looking both ways until I'm on the other side. With my rotten luck, if I'm ever hit by a car it'll probably be some country bumpkin from Lusikisiki driving in the wrong direction.

And my biggest worry about being knocked over by a car is not death - my greatest concern is that I'll survive, but my accident will coincide with the day I've taken a laxative. And now the Netcare guys are riding with me in the ambulance holding their noses.

Then I worry that when they finally change me into those hospital gowns, everybody will discover that I ran out of Vaseline Blue Seal and didn't moisturise my ashy bottom.

As you can see, these are not things normal people fret about. So the other day I'm holed up in a hotel on Durban's Umhlanga Rocks Drive. A friend pops in to say "hi" and have a double of bourbon with me. Then I realise I only have one clean glass. I could have called room service for another one, but my friend, Sguqa, is a notoriously impatient man when it comes to his libations. So I sommer grab a tube of that complimentary shampoo and proceed to wash the dirty glass.

It's all soap, right?

I've long held the view that human intelligence is an unsubstantiated and vicious rumour. The entire time I'm washing the glass, the pointer needle of my brain's Disgustometer is in the red zone, protesting. It just felt wrong. In this age, when the going gets tough, the tough sense-check things on Twitter and Facebook. And this is what I promptly did.

What I discovered is that many people share my "worrying about all the wrong things" disorder.

"Just think dandruff" and "I associate hair shampoo with armpit hair" were some of the responses. These are obviously irrational thoughts. Shampoo is not formulated from hair or pubes, as some people suggested.

My query raised many questions about things that seem to matter to us that, quite frankly, shouldn't. A friend of mine, Zimbini, confessed that during those last few days before payday, she has been known to run a bubble bath using Sunlight dish washing liquid. Other than the obvious problem of smelling like a dishcloth afterwards, I couldn't find fault with her dishwasher dunks. After all, generations of black people have been using Sunlight laundry soap as a colon irrigator for decades.

While still in Durban last week I sat watching from an uShaka Marine World eatery as sunbathers frolicked on the beach. Suddenly it started pouring. Scores of people bolted from the Indian Ocean and dashed for cover. I was sitting there speechless, wondering what I was missing. I wanted to shout: "Madam, you're already dripping wet. What's the problem here?" but I decided to bite my tongue. Durbanites don't respond too well to criticism .

I once found a guy happily drinking water from a tap inside a bathroom in a mall. My knee-jerk reaction was: "Eeuw!" However, the more I thought about it, the more I realised there was something wrong with me. Then I remembered an article I read about three years ago. Apparently the Brazilian government was encouraging more of its citizens to do what we all do but never admit to: take a whizz while having a shower, to conserve water. All of us should be doing this.

The same goes for leaving one's bed unmade. You're coming back to it in 15 hours, no? Author and columnist Sarah Britten even posted a link to research conducted in the UK proving that unmade beds were more hygienic.

My ultimate "worrying about all the wrong things" story was recently shared by a high school mate, Nkanyiso Buthelezi. Apparently a man lay on a railway track to commit suicide, unaware that it was a holiday and trains were not running. Two hours later he was seen entering a corner café, muttering: "At this rate, one is going to die of starvation out there."