Friday, October 2, 2009

Amy's Irrational Fears and the Irrational Fear-o-Meter

I’ve noticed that the older I get, the more irrational my fears become. Are irrational fears a byproduct of age? I assume it has something to do with me hearing about other people’s disasters. The longer I live, the more I hear about disasters. Here’s me in 2006: “Nah, bridges never collapse.” And here’s me in late 2007: “Whoa. Watch out for bridges!” Are these budding fears useful or a hindrance? Downhill skiing, while still a fun activity, is hinting at its dangers with each passing experience. When I’m on the chair lift, I think about how much it would hurt to fall off. When I’m scraping my way down the hill, I think about how little I’d like my knee to bend the wrong way until it snaps. Is aging killing my very few joys in life now or is it just making me more careful? I don’t know. Let’s examine some of these fears in-depth:

Fear Number One: My Kitchen Cupboards Can’t Take It Anymore And Come Crashing Down. This is a tough one. I think I have, among other things, 12 dish sets in one upper cupboard above my sink. That’s 12 big plates, 12 little plates, 12 annoyingly big bowls, and 12 seldom-used saucers. The other things are more bowls, some little dishes I swiped from work, and some big heavy decorative dishes my mom gave me. That’s a lot of weight for one small cupboard above a sink. What’s holding that cupboard up? A couple of screws? I don’t see the kind of supports I’d like to see, like the things holding bridges up (even defective ones). As far as I know, my cupboards are just stuck to the wall with some Elmer’s. Why isn’t everyone concerned about this?

Irrationality Level: High. Totally irrational, though? I think not. My friend Lindsey’s ktichen cuboard fell off the wall once, unprovoked. Therefore, it can happen!

Fear Number Two: Mountain Lions. I live in Boulder and there are mountain lions here. I’ve never seen one and I don’t even know if I’ve ever met anyone who has ever seen one, but we know they’re lurking out here somewhere. And they eat people! Maybe they’re in my back yard right now! (As an aside, I really don’t think it should be “backyard.” I think it should be “back yard” and that’s what I’m going to use). I check my back yard every day for mountain lions and while I haven’t seen one yet, I’m not going to stop checking.

Irrationality Level: Medium. I mean, some kid was attacked about four years ago in Boulder and a few weeks ago in Oregon. It can happen!

Fear Number Three: Deciding to Try to Survive for a Summer in a Bus in Alaska and Eating a Poisonous Sweet Pea Plant and Dying Alone of Starvation. Those of you who have read and/or seen Into the Wild will notice that I have too. Since then, I have found myself feeling nervous about somehow accidentally ending up in that situation and I really, really, really don’t want to do that. None of it. I don’t want to live in a bus, I don’t want to eat a poisonous plant, and I don’t want to die of involuntary starvation. I should add a sub-fear, here, which is of eating anything poisonous, even if it’s not in Alaska. I couldn’t even eat this arugula salad I once ordered at a hoity-toity restaurant because it tasted like poison. But anyway, there it is. I really don’t want this to happen to me and just thinking about it gives me the willies.

Irrationality Level: OK, Really High. But you know what, it really did happen! Just not to me.

Fear Number Four: My Front Bicycle Tire Falls Off When I’m Riding Down a Hill. Like the cupboards, what is holding that tire on? Just a little metal? Who put this bike together? Who was the last person to put that wheel on? Me? For heaven’s sake, I don’t know anything about bikes. Who let me put a tire on a bike? Do I KNOW that I did it right? I mean, I think I did it right, it’s really not that hard, but did I tighten the thingies enough? Too much? Is the wheel going to sieze up and stop turning because it’s too tight?

Irrationality Level: I’d Say Medium-Low. Because when I was in high school, it did happen! to a kid I knew and he really got a bad road rash on his face.

Irrational Fear Number Five: My Cell Phone In My Front Pants Pocket Will Give Me Ovarian Cancer. This one eats at me every day. Hopefully not literally. We all know that cell phones give off a little radiation. How much? I don’t know. How much will give you cancer? I don’t know. Does anyone know if these levels are safe? I mean, people used to drink radium thinking it would keep them healthy. Now we know that’s a bad idea. In 30 years, will we look back on our cell phones as cancer cubes (even though they’re never cubes, but “cancer rectangular prisms” is awkward)? I’ve actually thought about carrying my cell phone in my back pocket, thinking that butt cancer would be better. But Farrah Fawcett had a really bad time with anal cancer and we all know how that ended, so that’s probably not a good alternative. (Hey! Maybe a cell phone in the back pocket is how she got it! Did anyone look into that possibility?) A purse would be better, but I hate purses. Getting rid of it would be the best of all, but it really is convenient sometimes. So what do I do? Do you suppose they sell little lead-lined pouches? I just have no answers to this problem. Thankfully, I don’t use my cell phone very much, so I’m strangely not worried about brain cancer.

Irrationality Level: Dammit, Low. Low! I think it’s Low! I think it could happen!

So there we have five of my least-rational fears. What do you think? Is this the first step to becoming the Little Old Lady Who Only Drives a Buick on Sundays or do these fears have merit? It is a case of older-and-wiser or growing instability? I think what gives me some hope and confidence is that I know there are people, maybe even sometime contributers to this blog, who have irrational bee fears. I don’t have an irrational bee fear. They can crawl all over me and I don’t care. Oh, but I am afraid of brown recluse spiders hiding in the fingers of old work gloves and biting me when I put them on. Laugh if you will, I don’t care. It can happen!

7 comments:

Chris E. Keedei said...

Yup, those are all completely irrational, and you are completely insane. But thanks for sharing your deepest, most personal fears for us to laugh at. I like the colors especially -- they put me in mind of the terrorism color meter, which is apropos.

I don't think I have too many irrational fears, surprisngly. I very much believe in odds, and the odds of most such freak accidents occurring are so slim that I just sally forth, confident in the knowledge that while anything could happen, it probably won't, and that's good enough. Even after 9/11 I was kinda like "OK, well that was horrible, but it was kind of a fluke win for them. We should tighten up some security and make a few changes, sure, but I sincerely doubt anything like that will happen again." Then our government completely overreacted like an Amy who had just read Into the Wild and started doing everything they could think of that they could through some tortured logic connect to another possible attack, including shitting all over the Constitution and making people throw away water bottles before getting through airport security. The nation is like a kid who fell off a swingset and broke his arm and now wears a full suit of armor every time he comes near a playground.

But that's far afield from the post, sorry. May you never ride your bike near an Alaskan bus occupied by a mountain lion covered in cell phones.

Amy Mancini said...

If you're a fan of odds (and, by extension, statistics), then it's too bad you missed the Extreme Events conference in Fort Collins, CO, recently. It was organized by a French Statistitian friend of mine who would, I'm sure, totally concur with and enjoy discussing your reaction to our post 9/11 hysteria. But aside from the political stuff, the conference was all about the statistical probability of extreme events, such as a comet destroying the earth. I wanted to probe more about what the actual probabilities of these extreme events are, but I didn't get the chance.

I'm glad you liked the color-coding. It was an afterthought. If I had had the energy, I would have looked up the html codes for the colors between red, orange, yellow (which I opted not to use because it's too hard to see), and green. Like burnt umber. But I didn't.

Amy Mancini said...

I can't figure out how to edit my comment. I should have written "statistician."

emily said...

But the thing about odds is that something unlikely is likely to happen to you sometime during your lifetime. The odds are highly against nothing improbable ever happening to you. Still, I think my irrational fears are slightly less irrational. But maybe because they are mine. I am always afraid of tripping freakishly while walking and accidentally hurling myself over railings. I am also nervous about my car wheels coming off while driving fast because my car shakes so crazy over 70 mph. That might be because that happened to someone I knew once. That might make it more irrational.
I feel like the parks department is at least partly to blame for mountain lion fears (and bears. I bet more dogs kill people in national parks than bears and lions combined). I don't think I've ever gone hiking in California without huge scary posters everywhere about what to do in case you see a mountain lion.

pettigrj said...

Listen, people - bees are evil. They seek out the most vulnerable among us, and exploit our natural fear of striped things in order to torture us psychologically. They congregate in their congresses of doom - known to you and me as hives - and plot their fiendish schemes. Oh, these are fearsome creatures indeed.

Their sting is the most painful sensation in the animal kingdom. I know this because I have never been stung, and the idea of a bee sting has now been built up in my mind to such a degree that I would volunteer to wade in sulphuric acid before I would have a bee sting me.

A few years back, a scientific study concluded that the bee is the only animal outside of humans that obtains pleasure from terrorizing other animals. 80% of a bee's brain is dedicated to the production of an liquid - pueritica - that courses through its body and drives it to commit frenzied acts of evil. The gland that makes this liquid - the factorum diabolicus - has grown an estimated 15% in the last hundred years, making an already evil insect completely so. I wish I could report more scholarly research on bees, but sadly, every bee scientist in the last twenty years has been assassinated by marauding swarms.

Bees have been the principal cause for the downfall of at least three major civilizations: the Incas, the Sumerians, and the Byzantines. It was bees who sank Atlantis. If we do not keep an unending vigil against them, surely we will be next.

So no, I don't think fear of bees is irrational.

steph said...

Joe--guess what Taylor is going to be for Halloween? She doesn't sting, but she does bite! (we're working on that)

I love knowing other people have irrational fears. It somehow validates my irrational fears and makes them more rational.

My most recent irrational fear was when I heard they were going to blow up the moon this morning. I had 2 scenarios running through my head. 1) It would cause some sort of catastrophic shift in the universe and set into motion the end of the world as we know it, only to culminate in 2012, like the Mayans predicted, and 2) that it would unleash some sort of moon man/martian war against us, that will ultimately be our destruction, again in 2012, like the Mayans predicted.

I think I've seen the trailer to that movie a little too often...

Amy Mancini said...

OK, I feel less irrational than some of my counterparts, here. The moon thing - now that puts the "ir" in "irrational!" Though I'm feeling a little more wary of railings, now, specifically accidentally hurling myself over them, now that I've been given that idea.

Joe, my last bee sting was on the bottom of my foot. My foot swelled up for a week and it itched like nothing has ever itched before. But bees, bfd, I say...that's nothing compared to the brown recluse in the glove, which I wish I had made it's own numbered irrational fear, as it's become a fairly big one of mine, of late. Bigger than the Alaska one. It deserved more than a passing mention.