shark

This is like the picture that Katie has put up as a background on my computer. It is very cool and very big, and scares me every time I close a page and it pops up. It is not the actual picture (it is REALLY scary) because the actual picture was too big to display here on this blog, and I am not computer savvy enough to figure out how to shrink it.
I don't like scary things, I seldom watch a scary movie and if someone were to jump out at me from behind a corner, I would probably hit them out of pure reflex, and then go change my pants. Now this picture in and of itself is not that scary, I know that it is just a picture, it just makes me jump a little becasue it takes me by surprise. It's not scary like birds are scary (birds freak me out).
It has just got me wondering about when I became such a chicken (eeek! that's a bird). I used to be tougher than this. My grandmother was afraid of heights, she would freak out crossing a bridge, even a little bridge, she spent most of her life not going anywhere because she was too scared. Speaking of being scared, she used scare me when I was a kid by taking her teeth out, she thought it was hilarious. I don't know if she was always scared, my knowledge of her life is limited to seventeen years, but I am starting to think that fears grow if we give into them, and that's when they become phobias. I am the only person I know that is afraid of birds, and I also know that it is an irrational fear, but still they make me very uneasy. I am also the only one I know that was attacked by geese and rescued by little girls with backpacks.
Fear is not always a bad thing, it keeps me out of bad neighborhoods, and prevents me from jumping out of perfectly good airplanes (that part might just be common sense), but I would like to be able to control it enough to not embarrass my daughter as I run across her school parking lot, screaming with my arms flailing about, trying (and failing) to escape a bird attack.