I posted this on a message board a while back and meant to post it here too, but I forgot.<\/p>\n
Okay, a lot of y’all have problems with spiders and cruelly, evilly, and with malice I post pictures of spiders in the threads discussing your phobias. Like kids drawn to a train wreck you click my links and I sit in my little chair and quietly giggle.<\/p>\n
What you don’t know is the dark secret that’s been haunting me for years.<\/p>\n
I have a desperate and mortal fear of roaches.<\/p>\n
I don’t mind the little German ones. What I’m talking about are those big palmetto bugs, the nasty huge red ones that fly. When I encounter one, no matter how loudly the rational part of my brain screams into my ear, “It’s just a little bug and you are a big person and it’s not out to get you!”, the reptilian portion of my psyche is yammering away ten times louder in my other ear: “SCREAM AND RUN AWAY LIKE A LITTLE GIRL BECAUSE IT’S GOING TO FLY AT YOUR FACE, AT YOUR FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!”<\/p>\n
At which point, even if I’ve managed to keep myself under control for 10 seconds and the roach has long since skittered away from the light, I burp out a little shriek and then spend the next 30 minutes shaking my head sadly at my totally involuntary reaction. I simply cannot help the screaming. I could be walking through a room filled with TNT and know that any loud noise would lead to my demise and I would scream anyway. It’s like closing your eyes when you sneeze. Screaming at the sight of a roach. Same thing. Reflex.<\/p>\n
When I was a bachelorette I used to call my neighbors over to take care of roaches in my house. The guy in the garage apartment behind me was very kind. I’d tap at his door around midnight, ashy-faced and babbling incoherently. “Roach again?” he’d ask. I’d nod wildly. He’d drop what he was doing and come take care of it. He was a really nice guy except for his propensity to brandish a shotgun at the planes flying overhead.<\/p>\n
Another issue is that I must never ever hear the actual squishing noise. When Hub goes to stomp on a roach, I run into the other room with my fingers in my ears and yell, “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA” until he says it is safe.<\/p>\n
So there you go. My Achilles heel. I hate roaches. And I live in Texas surrounded by massive oak trees, which are the preferred habitat of discriminating palmetto bugs everywhere. And I scream a lot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I posted this on a message board a while back and meant to post it here too, but I forgot. Okay, a lot of y’all have problems with spiders and cruelly, evilly, and with malice I post pictures of spiders in the threads discussing your phobias. Like kids drawn to a train wreck you click […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/addlepated.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/addlepated.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/addlepated.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/addlepated.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/addlepated.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/addlepated.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/addlepated.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/addlepated.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/addlepated.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}