2000-11-13

feeling kinda

do you ever have one of those moments when you suddenly panic that you've left a message on the wrong machine? say, for example, friend A did something that really pissed you off. and you need to vent. a lot. so you call friend B, who turns out not to be home, and you leave a long, rambling message on their machine about what a jerk friend A is being. then you don't hear from either friend for a while. and it's possible that friend B is just out for the night, or crashed early, or is over at another friend's house (let's say friend C, for the sake of clarity). but what if that isn't the case? what if, by mistake, you dialed the wrong number, spaced out listening to the message because you were ranting mentally, and you actually left the diatribe on friend A's machine?

uh oh.

now you don't know what to do. do you call A, whom you're still mad at but to whom you may owe an apology? or do you call B, to see if they're home yet and if they've listened to their messages? or do you call C, to try to track down the other two? or do you just sit and stew about this, letting yourself get mired in the worst case scenario? or do you stew for a while, try to convince yourself that you called the right number (which you can't hit redial to check, because you've called a few other places since then), and then *really* panic and hunt down B, who tells you that everything is fine?

not that this has ever happened to me. well, not that exact scenario, anyway.

does irrational fear seem like an oxymoron to you? it seems like fear, by definition, is irrational. if it were rational, you could reason your way out of it. altho i suppose a fear of heights when you're on a ledge, or slipping on ice is kind of rational. at least there's a cause and effect there. and i've got the whole fear of heights thing going on. but some of my fears are just plain weird. like: i was walking to my best friend's house the other night, and on the way i walk by a brick wall with a cement cap. the wall stands just about shoulder height, and is right alongside a corner building. every time i round that corner, i'm gripped by the fear that i'll accidentally smash my teeth into the corner of the wall and end up a bloody pulp. and thinking about it, having that image flash thru my head, seems to make it more likely to happen. it hasn't, and it probably never will. but i worry about it each time.

or this: my white wine glasses are a relatively thin glass, especially around the rim. every once in a while, i'm worried that i'll bite down on the edge of the glass and crunch down on the glass. i suppose it's just a variation on a theme, because the end result isn't that much different from the first one.

the thing is, you never really want to tell anyone about these oddball worries, because they just won't seem like a big deal to them. my sis is afraid she'll get hit by a cement truck. who knows where that comes from? she says it comes from something mom always used to say, but i'll be damned if i can remember anything having to do with cement trucks. my best friend is afraid of spiders, and that doesn't really click for me, either. i mean, i'm not overly fond of spiders, but they wouldn't cause me to run away screaming. if you ever want to see someone move *fast*, you should see her when she spots a spider. i thought they hadn't invented that speed yet. she has a thing about ice cream trucks, too, which makes more sense. that song they're always playing is kinda creepy.

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i was shaving my legs this morning, and realized i still have a scar from a mosquito bite this summer. it was a particularly buggy night out at the poker shed, and i didn't put on the Off soon enough. even when i did, those damn skeeters kept finding places to bite me. i didn't realize how bad it was until the next day; when i looked down, it looked like i'd been bludgeoned by midgets - huge welts all over, from the knees down. most of them went away, but one of them has turned into a nice little scar.

so i did a little inventory... the vaccination scar on my left arm, which we all have, and a pale sliver of a scar on the back of my leg just under my knee, which i got from hopping off my bike too soon and catching my leg on the fender. that one hurt pretty badly. i've got a little scar by my eyebrow, from chicken pox. there used to be a huge rake of scars across my right thigh, but they've pretty much faded away. we were teaching a nature class down on the beach, and i misjudged my footing and slid down the side of the jetty, which was covered with barnacles. they weren't deep cuts, but there were a lot of them. my leg was pretty stiff for a few days, and then it just looked like someone had dipped a rake in chalk dust and skimmed it over my leg.

hm. not too bad. that's relatively intact. i'll have to give my bro a call and see if he still has a scar from the time i broke his nose with a silver platter. i swear i didn't mean to do it! for some reason it seemed like a good idea to make up a fringing swisbee game with this platter, and i managed to clock him on the bridge of the nose. he ended up getting a few stitches, i think, and my mom woke me up when dad brought him back from the ER just so i could see i hadn't killed him.

nothin' like family love, eh?

yesterday tomorrow