Totes Cray

This evening I ran to Walgreens to pick up some Tylenol for Lollers. As I was walking up to register to pay, this Crazy walks in and right up to me.

Staring wide-eyed at my dreads and now hovering right over my shoulder, The Crazy reaches out his dirty, grimy finger and says, "Ooh! Can I touch one?!"

Totally creeped out, I turn to him and simply say, "Um, please don't."

The cashier rings up my items all the while The Crazy continues to invade my personal space. I can feel his putrid breath on the back of my neck.

Cashier gives me my total and I slide my Visa through the card reader. The Crazy is STILL hovering. I try to conceal the pin pad as I punch in my debit pin, thinking that The Crazy is gonna follow me out to my car, steal my wallet, and then rip out a handful of my dreads before running to the nearest liquor store to empty my bank account on Miller High Life and Pabst Blue Ribbon.

I grab my receipt from Cashier and high-tail it out to my car. I pull out of the parking stall and as I peel out of the lot, I check over my shoulder and sneak a peek back into Walgreens. I kid you not, The Crazy was standing right in the store front STARING STRAIGHT AT ME as the automatic doors continued to open and close, open and close, open and close.

Seriously. Like scary movie style.

I am so skeeved out. And I'm pretty sure I need to wash my dreads.

HIV+

I'm obsessed with showering. I seriously take probably 5 showers a day. Not saying that I'm washing my hair every time and going through that whole routine. Rather, I'm jumping in the shower, soaping off my bod, then back into clean clothes.

I wouldn't say I was a germaphobe. I have no problem double dipping or sharing sips off other people's drinks. I just hate being sweaty and grimy. Ugh. The second I feel sticky, I strip and get in the shower.

Ummm...I also have to shower every time after I go to the bathroom...number 2 that is. Don't judge me. So, I just pray that I'm at home when the urge hits. If not, I'm upset the rest of the day until I can bathe cuz I just feel...dirty...and not in the good, Christina Aguilera kinda way.

Back story out of the way...

Yesterday I took Lalea to the dollar theater to see Tangled in 3D.

Side note: Have you seen pictures of Zachary Levi, the guy who does the voice of Flynn Rider?I guess he's also on the T.V. series Chuck? Regardless, SUPER cute! Might have to add him to the boyfriend list.

ANYWAYS...

We're getting all settled into our seats. I break out the illegal contraband that I smuggled in via my big ass purse. I hand Lolli her sippy cup and she places it in the seat cup holder. Not two minutes later, I hear a thud and then a roll.

"Uh oh," says Lolli.

"Great," says I.

I go from row to row searching for the lost sippy. Meanwhile, my demon child is yelling at the top of her lungs that she needs a drink right this second cuz she's so parched from all her candy eating and goodie snacking. I'm frustrated and embarrassed, struggling to see anything in the dimly lit theater.

Lalea switches from demon child to straight up spawn of Satan, screaming hysterically because the theater seat flipped up and she got her leg stuck in it.

I sprint back to help Lucifer out of the seat and instead of expressing gratitude for saving her life, she demands to know where her sippy cup is.

DAMN THAT SIPPY CUP!!!

Just wanting to shut this child up, I do the unthinkable. I drop down on my hands and knees, right onto the disgusting concrete theater floor. After only about 2.25 seconds of exposing my bare hands and knees to such filth, I was over it. My child could die of dehydration for all I cared.

But the damage was already done. For the entire length of the movie, I stressed and fretted over the types of germs and bacteria making their way into my blood stream at that very moment. Surely I had contracted AIDS from that floor.
When the movie was over, I couldn't get home fast enough. I briefly thought of jumping into the shower fully clothed, as I'm sure my garments were now soiled from the theater's dysentery. I even considered bleaching my skin...or at least my knee caps and palms.

Think I'm exaggerating? Have you ever been to Movies 8 in Provo? Then you know what I mean.

Eff sippy cups.

Phobias 2.0

Years ago, I was watching some documentary in my high school biology class. The film focused on this mother Surinam toad that carries her eggs by embedding them into the skin on her back. There, her eggs stayed tucked away until her young are fully formed and "hatch" by breaking out through her skin. The image of those embedded eggs burned through my retinas and straight to my brain. It was the most eerie thing I had seen!

Years later, I'm watching Planet Earth with my husband. They're doing some episode on The Great Barrier Reef and talking about the regeneration of coral. They show the coral spawning, releasing round, ball-like eggs from each individual polyp. GA-ROSS!!!!

Every now and then, I'll see something on TV or even in my very own surroundings that unnerves me—ant hills, whale barnacles. EEEK!

Then today, as I'm surfing through my blog subscriptions, one blogger posts this:

It's a lotus seed pod, and it absolutely creeps me out. But, while this image makes the hair on the back of my neck stick up, I can't seem to take my eyes off of it. I so badly want to take a pair of tweezers to this pod and pull out every little seed. For some reason, I think if I got rid of all those seeds, I'd feel better. Just like I feel better after kicking over an ant hill or popping a huge blackhead.

The same goes for this picture of a shark's ampullae of Lorenzini.

Ugh! Those little jelly-filled sensory pore thingies make my flesh crawl!!! Yet, I can't help fantasizing about taking a bobby pin to this shark and scraping all of them off! Somehow, that would dissipate the queasiness I feel upon looking at this picture. Sick! My skin is now covered in goose bumps!!

In addition to posting these pictures, the blog also stated that the uneasy feeling I get from looking at the images is caused by a bout of trypophobia. It's the fear of clustered, asymmetrical holes and apparently, I'm not the only one out there who suffers from it. But where honey comb and porous pumice stones and even the innards of a crumpet set some people running for the hills, I'm not affected in the least. I only get anxiety from the more organic/biological/living things as shown above.

Honestly, I don't know why these things give me the heebie jeebies. I'm just glad to know that my fear is actually a real, legitimate phobia. Anyone else irked by these things???

Phobias

This morning I saw my life pass before my eyes. Whilst eating Top Ramen mixed with some pretty potent chili sauce, I started coughing. Pretty soon, I was throwing up uncontrollably for 5 minutes nonstop. I had noodles and chili sauce spewing out of my mouth, nose, and I swear my ears. My throat and nostrils burn just thinking about it. Needless to say, I probably won't be eating Top Ramen again for a while.

As I relive that traumatic experience, I contemplate other things that make me fear for my life.

Spiders

In actuality, any creepy crawly thing makes me soil myself. I am so deathly afraid of bugs. I'm so scared of them that I won't even get close enough to kill one. I will scream for my husband or nearest male to rescue me from the throws on an insect. Once, a spider came creeping across the kitchen floor with pure intent on eating me. I yelled for Ryan but he just yelled back at me, saying I should just stomp on it. After a few more sobs and a few more tears, Ryan finally acquiesced. But the thing is, even after the spider was killed, I couldn't get near it. He finally convinced me to grab a wad of paper towels and pick it up and flush it down the toilet. Pretty sure I cried up until I flushed the sucker out to sea. I'm that scared. Seriously.

Heights

I think I'm really just scared of falling. I can picture myself losing my footing on a ledge and tumbling down a mountain cliff. While I was pregnant it was even worse. Even walking down a flight of stairs, I had this fear of slipping on a step and then hurtling down the entire flight of stairs to wind up at the bottom in one bloody heap. Gross, I know. But that's what goes through my mind. Don't ask me how I survive snowboarding. Riding up the ski lifts, all I do is imagine 1001 ways I could fall off the ski lift and plummet to my death.

Death

Not in the sense that I'm scared to die, but that something is going to happen to Ryan or Lolli. Ry thinks I'm full of it when I call him every now and then to check on him. If Ryan isn't home from work at a reasonable time, I start worrying that maybe a huge plate of steel fell on him at the shop and flattened him. Or worse, I have nightmares of waking up in the morning to get Lolli out of her crib only to find her not breathing. These fears are very real to me especially because I lost my father so suddenly.

Looking over this short list, I can think of about 10 more things I'm scared of: sharks, killer jelly fish, tight or confined spaces, bikinis...

Am I really that big of a baby? Or are there others out there that are just as frightened by these things as I am? Come on. Own up.