That's Me

That's Me

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Wings & Feet

Welcome to a new school year.

I hate the first day of class. It's always the same old thing. Introduce yourself, tell why you're in the class ("because it's required to get my degree" isn't really what the instructor wants to hear, I know this), sign the no cheating paper, hear names & info on a bunch of students you don't care about. Yay.

At one of my classes we had to share something funny/amusing/quirky/interesting about ourselves with the class. The class had to comment, in a positive way only, on our weird personality trait.

I shared a phobia of mine. It wasn't my fear of eyebrows that I decided to share today. I decided to go with my fear of anything with wings & feet. Even though I think it is perfectly rational to run screaming with your hands over your head when you see an animal flying within 500 feet of you, the hubs says otherwise.

According to my instructor, butterflies are beautiful & tranquil. Uh, no, have you ever looked into a butterfly's eyes?
Go ahead & call that beautiful. I call it freaky.

What else has wings & feet? Flies. Hmm...someone was somehow influenced by something to be able to come up with this
Yeah, that's The Fly. Wings & feet. Obviously I'm not the only one with this phobia because there's no other way to explain how you come up with something that hideous.

But that's not what made me scared of anything with wings & feet.

I grew up on a farm. We had chickens. One of my jobs was to get the eggs out of the hen house. If you were a big giant bird with these big flappy things hanging off your body, and you were just sitting in your nest, on your beloved little babies inside their beautiful hard shells, what would you do if this strawberry-blonde 10 year old girl reached under your butt to steal your little darlings? Apparently you would jump on top of her head, claw at her scalp & use your flappy things to beat the side of her head while you pulled her hair out, 9 strands at a time, with your pin-sharp 7" beak. Yes, their beaks were that long, I swear it. What does that 10 year old girl's brother do while she's being attacked by that freaky bird? He whacks at it with a bucket which makes the other scary big ol' birds with big flappy things & sharp beaks jump up & down to help their hen sister eat the girl's long hair, so the 2 children are surrounded by wings & feet.

It's not pretty. I know, because I was that 10 year old girl (didn't see that one coming, did you?) I'm deeply scarred from that experience. In more ways than one. My head is lopsided. That damn chicken ate the scalp on half my head. Because of that I have to wear the back of my hair all poofed up so you can't see the lumps. I have itty bitty feathers stuck in my eye sockets from that damn chicken's wings beating my eyeballs, which caused me to have bad eyesight. Because of that I have to wear glasses. And because of all of it, I'm scared of birds. They're all out to get me.

Okay, so I exaggerated a wee bit there about the effects of the chicken attack (exaggerating is something I rarely ever do). I don't have a dented head & there aren't any feathers under my eyeballs. I do need glasses & that experience did cause me to be scared of all birds. And I do poof my hair, but that's just 'cause that's what I do.

But that's not what made me scared of anything with wings & feet.

When I was 14 we moved to a bigger farm. Oh, what a joy moving is. It's even more of a joy when you have only a few days to move 72 sheds & barns full of stuff, so it was a great day. I was carrying a box when I felt something on my boob. Or what would one day be a real boob. I wasn't very blessed in the mammary department at 14. I dropped the box, looked down my shirt...this was looking up at me from my right boobie...
Yeeeaaaahhh...that's a Praying Mantis. On my body! Under my shirt! Uninvited! So what would you do if you saw that peeking up from your little white bra?

I screamed. Not just a "oh crap that surprised me" scream. An "oh shit something green & alive has attached itself to my precious body part that's already smaller than my friends' & after it devours that body part it's going to eat my face" scream. My poor father. He thought I was being kidnapped (I know this because I was a nosy kid & I overheard him telling my Mom that).

He came running around the house with the most terrified look on his face to find me topless, my clothing on the ground, yelling, "Get it off of me!! Get it off of me!!" After he plucked it off of me, he collapsed on the ground and said, "Why, Eddi? It was a bug. It wasn't going to hurt you." Was he serious?? This man who was laying on the ground panting & trying to put his heart back in his chest after thinking his daughter was being taken away from him...did he really just say that nasty thing wasn't going to hurt me?

"No, Dad, it was a 4' alien on MY BOOB!!"



That is why I'm scared of anything with wings & feet.

2 comments:

  1. So wouldn't that be wings and BEAKS then? :)

    ReplyDelete
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