I have never shoplifted anything and I wouldn’t ever dream of doing it. However, everytime I exit through the electronic security gates in a store, I hold my breath hoping that the alarm doesn’t go off. Any amount of effort to be nonchalant doesn’t work - I still pass through expecting it to go off. On the other hand, airport security checks don’t even phase me because I’ve got nothing to hide. Okay, I’m weird.
When I was a tot, my uncle told me that at night, there are skeletons under your bed, and if you get out of bed in the middle of the night, they will reach out and grab your ankle.
What a card!
Until WELL after my 30th birthday, if I had to get out of bed after the light was out, I would stretch my leg way out before touching the ground, and move quickly away from the bed.
Some mother dropped her child off the observation deck at Niagara Falls!?!!
Aw geez, there goes item number 1,935,599 on my “Irrational things to worry about” list! 
P.S. Thanks for the info, Kyla. It helps, but just thinking of that child falling. Brrrr!
Hey Minx, Do I know you? That so sums up me and my fiancee. Otherwise its nice to know that someone else is completely freaked by squirrels but, they are gonna run up my leg and attack my neck! shudders I hate those sneaky little bastards!
-Frankie
Lack of charisma can be fatal
I’m almost 28 and I’m still afraid of the dark too. I won’t sleep in the dark alone.
Balcony railings. If you even slightly touch them, they are going to give way, fall outward, and you will plummet to your death. This is how it works, I just KNOW it.
–
Teeming Millions: http://fathom.org/teemingmillions
“Meat flaps, yellow!” - DrainBead, naked co-ed Twister chat
O p a l C a t
www.opalcat.com
Escalators. The basement at night. Balloons. Monster under bed grabbing ankles. Riding/driving - I am afraid of being driven anywhere in a car, especially on a highway. I can drive some, but not very fast, not very far out of my neighborhood, and certainly not on a highway! Telephone calls, making AND receiving, thank God for the answering machine so I can pick up if it’s all right. To this day, I still cannot watch any episodes of The Twilight Zone, just hearing the music creeps me out.
I’ve always been afraid of the dark. Seems that my imagination just gets carried away without any external stimulus to distract it from it’s-self.
… but that can be a good thing.
I live on an isolated river bluff, about 30 miles from the closest street light, and it’s very dark here.
… so what I like to do, is to climb down to a rock ledge on the bluff, about fifty feet above the river. I turn off the flashlight and sit on my favorite rock, all alone, in the dark.
All I can hear is the sound of the water flowing by and the normal (weird) “night sounds”. It scares the hell out of me to be there, but I love it. I think It’s the best rush there is… not like those quick bursts of adrenaline that you get from daredevil stuf. It’s more like a slow injection of “aged” adrenaline that you get to savor and enjoy. It’s more electric-intense than any manufactured drug that I’ve ever tried … and It’s even free.
I know it sounds weird, but sometimes It seems like I’m not even myself anymore … that I could just as easily be an Indian sitting on the same rock, listening to the same sounds, looking at the same stars and feeling the same fear, a thousand years ago. I’m nearly certain that they (me?) did. It really is better than drugs. The point is, (and the reason this isn’t in the drug thread) that I think many kinds of fear can be good things, if you can learn to embrace them.
When I hear people say that they have “No Fear” … I feel sorry for them.
Fear is fun.
My big phobia is tornadoes- they occupy my dreams often. It’s not so irrational, cause I now live in a tornado alley. The house next to us was demolished 15 years ago.
Ironically, the past two times there were tornado touchdowns I was blissfully ignorant. The first was a year ago. I was in the bathtub & it was dark and stormy, but I didn’t think much of it. My honey called and asked if I was alright. “Uh…yeah…???” A tornado had passed overhead ten miles north and took the roof of some houses.
The last was a week ago, and, again, I didn’t know until a friend called …the tornado hit ten miles south and destroyed several mobile homes & took the roofs off houses.
I guess this doesn’t count as a stupid fear, but it’s the only thing that would cause me to flip out. So, oddly, I’m glad I didn’t know about em, cause I would’ve panicked so bad I’d have had a heart attack. How’s that for stupid???
TV,
re: sidewalk grates
Manny years ago I worked as a reactor operator in a chemical plant. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in one, but above ground level it’s all a bunch of sidewalk grates. On my last night I was on the top level of the reactor when the grate I was stepping off of fell through. I caught myself on the framework and easily climbed up, but it was, uh, exhilirating.
Bees and wasps will get my engine revvin’ as my older sister and Dad are (were) allergic to stings. Oddly, though, when I took my Dad’s ashes to his fave fishin’ hole to pour’im in, I had to walk through a jillion bees and I had no reaction to them at all.
Yeah beatle, you go boy! I can tell you, I hate any flying, stinging, crunchy, type of thing. Like a wasp or a bee or anything else that will fly up and sting your ass just because it can. I know, I know, bee’s won’t sting unless provoked because they die after they sting. So what? I have unintentionally provoked at least 10,426 bees into stinging my ass at one point in my clumsy life. And wasps? Those bastards are just downright nasty! I relish the exhilirating feeling of killing the buzzy assholes. I can’t stand wasps!
Oh yeah, and passing people on the highway where you have to drive head on with oncoming traffic makes me piss in my pants like a school-girl at an ICP concert.
Shah!
“I was being honest, @$$hole, I would expect YOU to know the difference.”
~~John Bender in The Breakfast Club.
Talk to me, baby! mcdsanti@hotmail.com
I have a fear of dropping valuble things in the toilet… like having a ring fall off when I’m wiping or something… something I value enough to have to…ugh…go in after it.
–
Teeming Millions: http://fathom.org/teemingmillions
“Meat flaps, yellow!” - DrainBead, naked co-ed Twister chat
O p a l C a t
www.opalcat.com
Frankie, I don’t think so. According to your profile, you’re in Seattle. Unfortunately, I was only ever in Seattle to change planes. I’m in NY and my friends are in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, respectively. It really is an odd coincidence, though.
And, chalk another one up for still being afraid of the dark. (I was actually afraid to be the first one to admit that).
Princess of the Time and Space Continuum since 1969 (upgraded to Goddess 01/07/00)-
OK, we have enough youth. How about a fountain of smart. =^…^=
When I was going to school in Boston, I wouldn’t go within five feet of the edge of the T platform when waiting for the next train, for fear some crazy person would come along and push me off.
Also, when I was a kid, I hated going down into the basement alone. I was convinced that there were things down there hiding in some dark corner, even when I had all the lights turned on, and they were just waiting to reach out with their clammy hands and grab me when I least expected it.
I am terrified of riding a bicycle. I’m sure those on this MB who know that I own and ride two different types of unicycle think I’m joking right now, but I’m serious. The last time I rode a bike, it terrified me. the thing goes pretty fast without you even having to pedal it, and the one I last rode didn’t even belong to me so I didn’t know how good the owner was at maintenance (what if the brakes didn’t work??). Unicycles are much safer; there are no gears and chains so you only move if you pedal, and there are no brakes worry about; if you want to stop, just stop pedaling and step off.
I’ve got a similar annoyance, Zulu. I detest answering machines. Even if I plan ahead of time what to say if a machine picks up, it never fails: my messages will always end with a heavy sigh and the phrase, “I hate answering machines.”
“I’m just too much for human existence – I should be animated.”
–Wayne Knight
My two major irrational fears:
-
That someone will slice through the back of my ankles.
-
The Field Museum.
Slightly less irrational:
- Heights. Specifically: (a) Having to stand on a chair or stepstool to, for example, change a lightbulb (b) Using a narrow staircase, especially one with no railing and © Balconies and things like that. I can, strangely enough, look out and down from a great height, provided I am inside and there’s a window between me and outside.
Your Official Cat Goddess since 10/20/99.
“We are here! You are saved!” --R. & F.
Fear of posting my fears on a message board.
HAHA
Fear of having a panic attack in a store is my worst fear. I have had them before and I feel like such a freak it only gets worse when I have one.
Spiders scare the hell out of me, my older brother is to blame for this. As a kid I would get into everything and everything includes creepy crawly things, but the moment my “Big Brother” had fear of an eight legged creature, it made me think I had to be fearful too, little kids are so suggestible.
Heights. ACK, ever see the movie “High Anxiety”? I am much like Mel Brooks in this movie, my butt cramps up and my stomach feels like I need to throw up. These are extreme hieghts, I can handle getting on the roof, but put me in a hotel room at 23 stories and I am a nervous wreck. Also, I get the same feeling when I see people on the roof of our building. I helped put together the communications and cabling on the building so I saw these guys through every step. We recently had men up on the roof (higher than the average 2 story home) putting up lightening rods, I looked up at them without harnesses and about jumped out of my skin with the thought of one of them falling off the roof. Even the thought makes me shiver!
Kat, I understand the ankles one. I’m afraid to use the gym because I’m absolutely convinced I’m going to snap my Achilles tendon. I don’t even know how an Achilles tendon is snapped, exactly, but I’m scared shitless about it.
Stinging insects are another one of mine. I remember the day my brother trapped a bee inside our house and, being something of a Little Gandhi, set it free outside. A few minutes later my father walks into the room and announces that there’s a bee knocking at the door, asking for me. I did not find this funny.
I used to be terrified of stinging insects. I would just freeze when one was around and let out “The Poisonous Insect Screech”. I was absolutely petrified.
But, to illustrate that fear is an ongoing lesson… our house is sometimes filled with wasps swarming in the spring.(They don’t sting then) We live in the sticks. It immobilized me at first, but then I learned that there are times the wasps will pop you, and times they don’t. We treat the stings herbally, and that works. At their peak time though, they’re still a pain. But the amazing thing is, through understanding their life cycle, I’m not terrified any more. That was a BIG step, but I’m glad not to have that freak-out any more.
Fear of bees is not irrational. Almost everybody I know is afraid of bees. Not me, though. Once, there was a yellowjacket or something in my house, and I wanted to get rid of it, so I (somehow) got it to land on my index finger, and I was able to walk it outside and free it. Everybody looked at me like I was crazy. I’m the only one I know who acts like this.
I’m not afraid of the dark either. And I’m not terribly afraid of heights (I did go bungee jumping.)
One thing that I am afraid of, though…when I was a kid, I used to see the cables connecting powerlines to the ground, to support them. I thought they were actual wires, and I was terrified that if I touched one (without the yellow plastic thing on the outside) it would electrocute me. Later I learned that they were just cables, but to this day I hesitate to touch one. It’s weird.
Oh, yeah, I’m afraid of driving. I can’t even move the car out of the driveway. I don’t much like being a passenger, either. I’m dreadfully afraid of being in a car accident. I’m okay just driving in down, but I get increasingly nervous on highways.
A mother dropped her baby that has Downs’ syndrome off the Capilano Suspension bridge near Vancouver, BC. She claims it was an accident, but I’ve been on that bridge, and the only way it could have been an accident if she was on tiptoes and leaning over. Fortunately, the trees slowed the baby’s fall enough that she was rescued with only scrapes and bruises.
It’s not an annoyance…it’s fear. I’m not annoyed by phones, I’m afraid of them. The fear is annoying, though. And I always make an ass of myself on answering machines too. I start to think about what I’m going to say, but then drift off, then I hear the beep, and promptly forget who I was calling and why.
Like I said before, I’m only afraid of some heights. I can look straight down off apartment buildings, but I can’t stand on a chair or step stool to change a lightbulb.