Masks, Snakes and an Occasional Sea Weed

Scribbit is hosting a great October Write Away contest.  The theme of the contest is “things that scare me”.  I am so excited.  I contemplated writing “the deep” list of things that scare me.  Such as war, bear attacks, and world hunger.  But that just seemed a little too heavy for Halloween.  I instead opted for the everyday things that seem to send shivers and chills up my spine.  I mean things that really scare me.  Pee my pants scary.  Check the locks and hide under the covers scary.  That’s how scary these things are for me.  You will soon understand the depths of my anxiety issues 🙂

1.  I am so scared of that stupid mask from the movie “Scream” that I refuse to answer the door to anyone trick or treating with it on.  Tomas has to do it.  Especially if it’s a tall teenager.  The movie itself wasn’t scary to me.  Just the mask.  You can imagine how tense I became when I recently saw in the paper that someone was using that mask when robbing places.  I checked all my locks that night.  And then I checked them again.  Then I took my cordless phone and held it in my hand as I fell asleep.  Okay, not really.  I just checked to make sure the phone was on my nightstand and fully charged.  Not that I would answer it if it rang in the middle of the night anyway.  That would be too scary.

2.  Snakes.  Not an uncommon thing to be scared of, but I can’t even watch a film with snakes in it without picking up my feet off the floor.  This has to do with the fact that when I was young, I unknowingly stepped on a snake hiding in the grass and it wound around my lower leg before slithering off.  I ran off blindly screaming and waving my hands in the air with my eyes closed.  I can still feel it on my leg.  A hard thing to get over and admit to when you are a biology major teaching middle school and high school students who have a natural affinity for those disgusting creatures.  What biology teacher freaks out about a harmless reptile?  This one.

3.  Sea Weed.  Does anyone really like to go swimming in this slimy yuck?  Things can hide in seaweed.  Such as killer fish or blood sucking squid (Although they have never been observed in Lake Michigan, I am sure they exist.)  I have wet myself before when a large strand of seaweed wrapped around my leg while I was swimming at dusk.  My first thought was that it was an eel or an octopus trying to drag me under.  My second thought was that it was a new type of water snake that ate humans for lunch (note #2).  Thank goodness there weren’t many people at the beach that late in the day to see me peeing myself, flailing wildly in the water as if I was on fire, and screaming “Get it off!  Get it off of me!” like a ninny.  I still refuse to go into a body of water when it is even remotely dark.  I don’t even like to swim on a cloudy day sometimes if there is any amount of sea weed present.

So, there you have it.  Three things that I am really truly scared of.  Looking at it, I think I have a fear of things wrapping around my leg.  What does that mean on a psychological level? Hopefully, it means I just don’t like long, slimy things that I can’t see.  Bring on the spiders, bring on the fake brains “made of noodles”, and the moving skeletons.  I can handle all of those.  Just don’t come to my house trick or treating while dressed as a water snake hiding in sea weed with a “Scream” mask on.  One of us wouldn’t make it out alive.