Anti-Focus: I have absolutely no fear of insects. Period. I attribute this to neither of my parents having any fear of them and therefore never having been subconsciously conditioned to fear them. The one exception was that I used to be abjectly terrified of bees and wasps. I was afraid of the supposed incredible pain of being stung. In fact, the first time I got stung was when a bee landed on my arm and I was struck with such abject terror that I freaked out and tried to violently shake it off, which obviously didn't work and the bee clung on harder, got agitated, and stung me. Afterwards I was in such shock as to what had just happened, and I was so surprised that even though it hurt like a motherfucker it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd built it up to be, that I instantly lost all fear and actually started laughing out loud at my own stupidity. Just a couple of months ago I was studying the week before finals and sitting at a table outside. At about 3 AM we are working on something when the girl I am with suddenly starts freaking out and points at something. I see this: Spoiler Even I was pretty fuckin surprised by the sheer what-the-fuck-is-that-it-looks-so-fucking-freaky-holy-shit-its-a-giant-fucking-bug-ness of the whole thing for about half a minute which manifested itself in me staring intently at it, before eventually deciding to do something. So I grabbed an empty cocoa cup, scooped the thing up, and tossed it into the bushes behind a brick wall. That was when I realized that like the whole room full of people had come to look at what was going on and the girl I had been studying with was pressed up against the glass along with the others watching the whole thing. And then everyone just sort of went back to work like nothing happened. Here's the official Potatobugs.com view on them:
For 2PumpChump: I am sorry I couldn't help it. Focus: Anyways I have a bad fear of heights. When I am on a plane I look like I am about to shit myself the entire ride through. Unfortunately after almost 20 years of not being on a plane I had to fly to Brazil to break the ice again. A 13 hour flight without doing anything other than looking like I was trying to crush the armrest under my white knuckle grip. No sleeping, no reading, no talking, no nothing. After that I had to be on planes 7 times in the span of one year. Whhhhhhheeeeeee!
I almost drowned as a kid, so I have a BAD fear of water. I mean piss-you-pants fear. My junior year I spent the entire summer taking swimming lessons and trying to acclimate myself to the water so I could pass the damn army combat water survival test. It was still one of the hardest things I've done.
Why I won't go swimming in the ocean: I don't care what the statistics say about the chances of an attack are, there's no way I'm going to risk it. I eat fish as is the proper order of the universe, not the other way around.
When I was a kid, ten or eleven, the basement in my house was finished and had a TV room in it. One night when it was storming out I was watching TV real late and eventually fell asleep. When I woke up, the power in the house was out, and the basement had absolutely zero light. On top of that, in my groggy state I thought I was in my bedroom - where the hell else would I fall asleep? With that in mind, I felt my way to where the door to my room would have been, and found only wall. In my mind I was trapped in my room, the door had disappeared, I had no where to go. Stuck. Commence freakout. I started pounding on the wall as hard as I could, waking up my parents, and shouting and crying. By the time my parents got to me I was hyperventilating and pretty much hysterical. Eventually I calmed down, and to this day I'm not afraid of the dark/claustrophobic, but I remember that as being extremely terrifying.
Getting hit by a car while jay-walking. When I was younger, I used to think that whenever I jay-walked, I always thought that, just maybe, my eyes were playing tricks on me, that there was actually a car heading my way, and that any minute I'll be flying through the air. I still jay-walked anyway, I forced myself to. But sometimes I still get a little scared whenever I jay-walk.
My biggest fear is a little hard to explain, but it's dealing with people who have lost the faculty of reason (e.g., due to illness or severe intoxication). You know that "fight or flight" response? I go from 0 to 100 on the "flight" scale when this happens. Now, you're thinking, "DrFrylock, that's a little weird but honestly how often do you have to deal with that?" Answer: lots, unfortunately. Some people get drunk and they get sad or thoughtful or they barf and pass out or whatever. Those I can deal with. It's the ones that decide that their New Reason for Being is that they want to go for a drive, right then and there. They can't be reasoned with. They nearly have to be physically restrained from grabbing keys (theirs or others) and peeling out. Look even if I'm a friend, I'm not the kind of friend who is really interested in having a knock-down drag-out WWE wrestling match to prevent you from killing someone. I am the designated driver, not the designated keep-you-from-killing-a-mother-of-six-er. Fuck you. Nowadays I just avoid situations where that occurs because I don't want to deal with it. So that's a small part of my problem. The bigger part is undoubtedly illness. For whatever reason, when members of my family get extremely ill, they inevitably get paranoid, irrational, and combative. You know how there are always those movies and TV shows where they show a hospital ward and everyone is just sort of laying out in bed calmly recuperating or being sick or whatever? Not my family. No, they get into this paranoid state where people are out to get them and their New Reason for Being is that they need to rip out all the tubes that are attached to them and walk out of the hospital. They will be happy to deal with anyone that wants to interfere with that, including me. It will usually involve crying and pleading, "please please get me out of here. I'm in the worst pain of my life! This is terrible! Just get me out of here! I need to get out! Why aren't you helping me?" When they're not pleading, they're trying to pull tubes out, or they'll bite/pinch/try to slap people. This goes on for hours. It's really awesome. About 75% of the grandparents were that way, plus Dad. Bonus: opiates (morphine, etc.) exacerbate this in my family members and temporary anti-psychotics (e.g., Haldol) don't ever seem to work very well either. You'd think people in a hospital would know how to deal with this, but as long as you're family and you're there, the patient is your problem. Usually the paranoia/combativeness peaks at night, when 90% of the staff is gone and there's nobody around that can possibly help. One of my most favorite experiences was once when Grandpa got really sick and went to the hospital with Mom (where he promptly freaked out as above), and they left me to watch Grandma at home. To deal with the stress, Grandma decided that she was going to get falling-down drunk, which she did mostly before I got there. This greatly exacerbated her alcoholic dementia. Then, her New Reason for Being was that she was going to drive herself up to the hospital. When I managed to convince her that was a bad idea, she decided she wanted to walk. So I was trying my best to keep an 80-year-old woman from leaving the house without physically confronting her. For three hours. Since I would not let her go, she would instead go fix herself more drinks, which consisted of half a tumbler full of cheap vodka topped off with a mixer. When I tried to dissuade her from that, it was back to the driving/walking. Then Mom calls and asks if I can bring some records up to the hospital for her that they desperately need, and she's a little frayed because Grandpa is freaking out up there. Of course taking a quick trip up was pretty difficult because there was no way to leave Grandma alone and she really wasn't in any condition for a trip. Yeah that was a double-whammy night.