» Phobias

Nothing normal
I have no normal fears. I have pet snakes and a tarantula, heights don't phase me, and public speaking is a breeze.

But there's a host of weird things that scare the crap out of me.

Mushrooms and dead crustaceans: anything that uses chitin as a structural protein gives me the willies. I can't touch them, and the thought of eating them will make me cry.

Talking trees: just scare the snot out of me. I've never been able to watch The Wizard of Oz, and I can't go in the gift shop of a Rainforest Cafe.

Rice Crispies: When I was 3, my mom poured me a bowl and said "listen, they're talking to you." I started crying and said I couldn't eat them if they were going to talk to me. Over 20 years later, I've never been able to eat them, or anything at all related. No Nestle Crunch, no Rice Crispie treats. Once, my boss's daughter found out about the fear, and put a single Rice Crispie in my mouth. I felt like I was eating a live bug.
(Sat 12th Apr 2008, 3:23, More)

» Lies Your Parents Told You

My mother
When I was about 3, poured me a bowl of Rice Crispies and said "Listen, they're talking to you!" I started crying and said I couldn't eat them if they were going to talk to me. Twenty years later, I still can't bring myself to eat Rice Crispies. I had WAY too active an imagination for something like that.

My aunt used to tell my mother, nine years younger, that their real mother was a princess who would come to pick them up eventually. My mother spent hours waiting by the window.
(Fri 16th Jan 2004, 23:34, More)

» School Trips

I still have a fossilized sharktooth
When I was 14, our science teacher planned a trip for us to go to a cave about an hour away to search for fossils. We were told the cave would be damp and cool, so dress in long pants and long sleeves, closed shoes, the works.

We get there, and the "cave" hasn't been a cave for about 50 years, in which time the area was turned into a quarry and blasted to hell, making a large open area, with no shade, surrounded by limestone walls. This is April-ish, in Florida. We're wearing pants and long shirts, and it's well over 100 degrees F in the quarry. However, there are indeed fossils all over the place, which we try to dig up and make the best of the situation, ignoring the heat, our faces getting sunburned, etc.

The teacher and several students find this huge rock with lots of fossils imbedded in it, and get the bright idea to bring it on the bus and take it back to school with us. So the teacher and three students start carrying it back. Someone drops their end. The rock was very sharp. The teacher had several fingers cut up. One of the students fared worse; one of his fingers was peeled open like a banana. We saw bone. Blood everywhere. Cue lots of 14 year old screaming, and injured boy saying things children should not be saying in front of teachers. They pile us all into the bus, and we all drive to the emergency room, dropping off the injured. Her husband and his parents had to drive an hour to get out there. The rest of us are taken back to the school, where we attempt to call our parents to come pick us up. Other chaperones had to wait several hours until everyone had been picked up.

Fucking disaster, it was. The kid's hand was fucked up ever since.
(Sat 9th Dec 2006, 9:56, More)

» Scars with history

On my forehead
There's a small wrinkly scar, from when I was 4. At my aunt's house, I slipped on a throw rug and fell head first into the doorframe. Went to the Emergency room, got butterfly stitches, went on with my life. A week or so later, I got the stitches out, and went back to my aunt's. And immediately slipped on the same rug, fell into the same doorframe, and hit my head in the exact same place. Back to the emergency room. Cue a year of follow-up visits and developmental tests to find out if the two concussions in a week had left me brain damaged.
(Sat 5th Feb 2005, 16:19, More)

» Embarrassing Injuries

My scars
My chest is covered in little pockmarks. I usually tell people it was the itchiest part of my childhood bout with chicken pox, but that's not true. These are much more recent. See, when I'm in the shower, I close my shampoo bottle by pushing it against my chest. Frequently, it catches a bit of skin. The resulting small wound heals in to a pock mark.

I've also done numerous stupid things like sprain my ankle falling off a sidewalk, get a concussion from blacking out (sober!) in the shower, and slice my arm up on an exposed screw at a playground, in such a way it looked like a botched suicide attempt.
(Fri 3rd Sep 2004, 20:08, More)