Phobia! Part 1

I saw recently on my friend Kendra’s blog, a “tag” posting about her fears, joys, obsessions, etc and it got me to thinking about my own fears. Fears can be an interesting thing – sometimes they are created over time through experience, sometimes you are born with them, and other times people purport to have a certain fear in order to get attention. I have seen and heard this time and again. Have you ever been to a fair, carnival, or even a circus and sat behind some annoying teenage couple and heard the gum chewing, hair twirling girl say to her pubescent boy toy that she is “like totally afraid of clowns” and just wanted to kill yourself? From experience, I can say that most people that state they are afraid of clowns are usually just teenage girls looking to get attention from the opposite sex for having a cute and quirky fear that is fun to talk about and gets the idiot boy’s sympathy for her seemingly innocuous yet endearing phobia. I will concede that some people, perhaps people that as young children accidentally wandered into a playing of the movie “It,” are truly and incurably afraid of clowns, but for the most part, I think that exclaiming you are afraid of clowns is just part of the ubiquitously flirtatious dialogue that teenagers spout. [Author’ note: I just looked up clown phobia in Wikipedia and I would like to issue an apology to all of you that are diagnosed with Coulrophobia…if it has a cool Latin name, it must be real!]

Well, enough about other people’s fears, I would like to present to the world, my own fears (some quirky and some serious) in no particular order [Author’s note: in the editing process of this post, I realized that it has gotten a little long and will be further separated into several posts, and as such, only the first of my fears will appear in this post]:

1. Expired Milk – I know that Jerry Seinfeld did a bit on expired milk (what DIDN’T he do a bit on?) in which he talked about not taking chances with expired milk…as if the date stamped on the carton could actually tell you the exact second that the milk was no longer safe for human consumption. I am a total believer in the date on the carton – you do not even THINK about drinking milk past that date! It is as if God himself gave all of us a warning against yucky chunky milk and we need to obey the date! My husband, on the other hand, uses the sniffing method for determining milk expiration…a week past the expiration date, if it still smells okay, he’ll actually drink it! I mean, I have tried this method and I swear that milk always smells funky! He tells me that my mind does this to me and the yucky smell is in my head (and from the smell of the rim of the carton, where you put the lid on), but maybe, just maybe, I have milk expiration psychic powers and the smell is a sign that you just don’t drink it! I mean, really, why chance it? I have a really finicky stomach anyway and I just don’t chance things like expired milk. If Kevin’s stomach weren’t built to withstand a nuclear holocaust (seriously, the man can eat raw chicken and not get sick!) maybe he wouldn’t be so gung-ho about drinking the milk either!