Things That Scare Me

Halloween has me thinking about all the things that make me anxious or just sort of creep me out. Once you get going on a list like this, it’s hard to stop.

Here are only a few of the things that scare me:

• The ghost story my husband tells about a basement apartment, a neighbor and a dead relative.

• Snuggies (especially the new designer leopard prints)

• The fact that at 3:00am almost everything on an infomercial seems like a reasonable and practical purchase (including the cellulite remover, the get-rich-through-buying-real-estate-course, and the automatic reloading paint roller when I lived in a rental apartment that I wasn’t allowed to paint.)

• The long gasp a baby takes just before he’s about to let out one of those really loud wails.

• Melted plastic

• The recurring dream that starts out where I’m having lots of fun at a party/ beach/coffee shop/karate dojo and I run into an old college buddy. When he asks me what I’ve done with my life since graduation, all I do is stutter and stammer because I can’t think of a single thing.

• The blue computer screen of death (that’s the blue screen that shows up instead of all your icons when your computer is never going to start again)

• Another season of reality shows

• An empty page. I love to revise. It’s those first drafts that get me.

• Lines of people waiting for printouts two minutes before the library closes.

• Another really innovative social networking tool that everyone in the world is using that you MUST be on because it is so important that it is going to change the political, social and cultural fabric of our society (of all societies) and perhaps even alter the course of the human evolutionary path. And if you’re not using it, then you will be viewed as a washed-up has been, a cultural anachronism clinging to an obsolete way of life, the same way a broken clamshell clings to the shore just before a wave comes crashing over it and washes it out to sea. And people will make fun of you and mock your luddite values.

• Floods

• Medical tests

• Essays that predict the end of books and libraries (especially when the essayist decides to wax poetic about the above mentioned social networking tool)

• Snakes. Oh heck, throw in most creepy crawly things and scampering things too. Small rodents, bugs, reptiles, etc.

• Watching the dog go crazy when she hears a scratchy sound in the walls. This is another manifestation of fear of creepy crawling/scampering things. Oh and just so you don’t think I live in rodent-infested squalor, this happened only once and not in the current house. And it was only one mouse.

• Traffic

• Not having a pile of books on my nightstand to look forward to.

• Nature documentaries: They’re either about global demise (pollution, natural disasters etc) or they’re giving you an up close and personal view of the cycle of life. The second I see a tiger eyeing an antelope who has strayed from the herd, I reach for the remote.

• That there’s a Miley Cyrus song on the radio right now and I kind of like it.

• The enormous amount of fur that my dog leaves all. over. the. place. This fear increases exponentially when I learn that someone is stopping by for a visit.

• The dentist’s drill (and I feel bad about this one since I have a really nice dentist).

• How really clueless I am about fashion trends. Big shoulder pads in or out? What about tie dye? And at what age should you stop wearing sneakers with sparkles on them?

• That I don’t know the name for those metal things that people wear in their stretched out earlobes.

My list could go on and on…Happy Halloween