KerryAndGabe.com

It was tough to decide where to start in my new blog series on “weird things about me.” As I started to write my list, I realized that it may take a while to get through them all. I didn’t want to start with the more unusual phobias and habits, so I’ll just start with the easy one. Arachnophobia.

First, you may notice the lack of a photo with this particular blog post. Generally, I like to have an accompanying photo for each post, but this time I can’t bring myself to post one. That would require me to search for such a photo (though I do recall that Gabe had one from our photography class that we took last year, but I don’t want to look at it too closely).

So, I have a fear of spiders. Big deal. Afterall, it’s one of the most common phobias. Well, I had to start somewhere, and I would be remiss if I left this one out of my series. One story in particular comes to mind when trying to explain the degree to which I am terrified of the tiny creatures. Somewhat recently, I was home alone, and I had been upstairs. I was about to go downstairs when I saw that a spider was hanging out on the wall, waaaaaay high up where the landing of the stairs is (almost two stories as the living room is a 2-story living room). This meant that I was now stuck upstairs until the spider could be eliminated. I couldn’t possibly go down the stairs at this point, because as soon as I did, the spider would fall on my head. They like to do that, you know. No way I’m walking under a spider. Even if gravity and the spider’s clear penchant for jumping on my head wasn’t a concern, there could be a piece of web in my path. I would hit the web and then the spider would be stuck to the webbing and end up on my head. See the dilemma here? I certainly couldn’t reach him (even if I were brave enough to get that close with a paper towel, yikes). Fortunately, I have cleaning supplies in the upstairs bathroom complete with a roll of paper towels. I tried to see if squirting him down with glass plus would work, but he was too far away to be affected. So I wadded up paper towels and doused them in 409 and “bombed” the spider. About 35 paper towel wads later, he eventually came down far enough so that I could spray him with solution so he could be slowly drowned and poisoned to death. Sounds cruel when you put it this way, but you have to consider the grim alternative (spider jumping on my head).

Writing this post is actually fairly disturbing. I thought about writing it this past weekend, and I was doing a little searching on arachnophobia, but I wasn’t able to look at too many pages in my searching. Two main reasons. The biggest is that I can’t stand to look at photos of spiders or to see them on tv or in movies. I have to shield myself from it as the image will stick into my head. I have to avoid thinking about them at all as a preemptive measure. If they get into my head, then I will become paranoid (a temporary, usually short episode) or I will have night terrors (a much more disruptive episode). The short paranoia episode has happened several times during this post. A quick look around me ensures me that I am in no immediate danger, and I can return to my typing. Just gotta check the ceiling and wall and immediate surroundings. (I just checked a second ago, just to make sure). This brings me to the second reason I didn’t look at too many links yesterday. As I was searching, I had a paranoid episode where I started to search my surroundings. Lo and behold, there he was. He was sitting there practically directly above my head ready to pounce! See? I’m not crazy? Good thing I was inspecting my surroundings or I would have had a bigger issue once he pounced on me. I think I checked at least a half dozen times while writing this paragraph (everyone knows that spiders are very fast, so I have to keep checking).

Speaking of the paranoia episodes…I saw the movie Arachnophobia in the theatre. Twice. I have absolutely no idea why I subjected myself to this terror. Maybe I was trying to face the fear. Or maybe I enjoyed the adrenaline rush, or perhaps I just had a sadistic need to claw the arm of friends and family who accompanied me. Whatever reason, the movie has haunted me for almost 20 years (yes, I know it came out in 1990. I’m rounding up, ok?). Two scenes still pop into my head (or the idea of them, rather) from time to time. One is a shower scene where there are deadly spiders as a woman is probably shampooing her hair or something. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in the middle of shampooing my hear, eyes closed, and suddenly I have a very urgent need to ensure myself that there are no spiders. I don’t care about getting soap in my eyes, I only care about making sure that I’m alone in the shower. It doesn’t matter that spiders have NEVER joined me in the shower. All that matters is that they COULD. The other scene is where one of the spiders attacks as the old lady is going for the switch on a common household lamp. I still have residual fear when I reach under lampshades to touch that switch.

I thought that I would talk about my night terrors in this post, but I think I’ll have to save them for another day. I have plenty more examples of my phobia, but I think you get the picture. Some of you may now realize that what you call a “phobia” is not really a “phobia” but perhaps just a distaste. Hrm, maybe I should be concerned as I’m seeing that the Phobia entry on wikipedia categorizes phobias as a mental illness. Oh, that reminds me of the virtual reality therapy that I saw for curing arachnophobia. I’d include a specific link, but the ones that I saw this weekend had photos…and I really don’t want to take that risk right at the moment. The idea of the virtual reality treatment scares the crap out of me. Just read about the finale where you have to actually encounter and pick up a hairy fist-sized bird-eating tarantula in your virtual world, complete with real world simulated model. Uh, no thanks! I’ll just live in fear.

Posted by kerry on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 4:43pm.
Categories: life.