B is for Boogeyman

I was never afraid of the Boogeyman when I was a kid.  Monsters under the bed?  Um, yes.  Not monsters, but escaped convicts, actually.  I was safe from them as long as none of my limbs ever ventured over the side of the bed.  The escaped convicts might grab me.  Maybe that has something to do with the fact that I grew up less than two miles from Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary.  But I digress...

Aside from being yanked under the bed by a murderer who somehow went unnoticed in a prison break, I am still afraid of the same three things at 28 that I feared at 8.

1. Spiders.  I have shivers just talking about them.  I can feel them crawling on me.  Nasty.  I don't know why, but I'm terrified.  Nothing makes me teenage-girl-shriek like pulling back a shower curtain or picking up a dirty shirt and finding one of these little suckers.  It's all I can do to stomp on one.  I once found a wolf spider in a laundry basket.  In a moment of insanity, I decided to catch it in a jar and Google it so I would know if the eggs it had surely lain inside my ear canal while I was sleeping would hatch into poisonous baby spiders, or just the kind that would eat my brain (it was non-poisonous).  I then took it outside to smoosh it.  I had to fling the jar to get it to come out.  And then I couldn't find it.  And I felt like it was crawling on me for, like, three days.  Awful.

2. The Dark.  Yeah, I'm serious.  I'm nearly 3 decades old, and I'm afraid of the dark.  I'm not really afraid to be in the dark, I'm just afraid to walk into a dark room.  I don't sleep with a light light or anything, but I have to turn on a light in order to walk into a room.  I don't know what I am afraid might be in there.  Maybe one of those murderers followed me all the way to the East Coast.  I'm still funny about dangling my appendages over the side of the bed, too.

3. Throwing Up.  I will do anything... A.Ny.Thing. to avoid vomiting.  Even if I know I would feel better afterwards.  I don't care.  I will be miserable and suffer with abdominal cramps for 12 hours before I will spend 12 minutes puking.  I had a record going of 3 years puke free, until my daughter so graciously decided to bring home the stomach flu from day care back in February.  Yuck.

So, yeah.  I'm a big chicken.  Anyone else afraid of something that an adult should fear?