What do carbon monoxide, sandra bullock and halibut have in common?

I picked a bad time to launch another 20 posts in 30 days initiative. Schoolwork picked up, my computer lost its mind, and I took ill with a particularly draining head cold. But I’m here now. I hope you all appreciate the blood, sweat and tears I put into this frivolous exercise I call blogging. Nevertheless, I’m pessimistic about meeting my goal, but I hope you’ll still support me in my effort.

As promised, here’s my TOP FIVE LIST OF (MOSTLY IRRATIONAL) FEARS.

5. Sustaining injury to my right eye. I am legally blind in my left eye. If someone shoots an arrow and it lands in my good eye, or I contract some sort of David Patterson-esque infection that ruins my optic nerve, I’m screwed. I can see somewhat out of my left eye, but I couldn’t read, drive, or do most things I take for granted now. It’s possible my vision would strengthen if my left eye was all I had, but it gets increasingly unlikely as I get older. Would anyone be my Anne Sullivan?

4. Gas leaks. As a child, I watched absurd amounts of Rescue 911. Stories of old people dying from gas leaks in their motor homes were featured frequently, and I became preoccupied with buying a carbon monoxide detector for our house. I tried to drop casual hints to my mother, but she felt a lot less threatened by the silent, odorless gas than I did. Consequently, every night before bed, I would open my window and hungrily gasp in as much fresh air as I could. I figured if I started the night with clean air in my lungs, I would be more likely to survive an overnight leak. Sometimes, when I was very afraid, I even slept with the windows open in the dead of winter. This fear is a lot less intense now, but the radiator in my First Aid class hisses maniacally, and I can’t help feeling like we’re about to blow up, or maybe someone will come up to our remote fourth-floor classroom and discover 15 dead bodies.

3. Driving a bus. Whenever I tell people about this fear, they always say, “Oh, so you’ve seen Speed?” No, I haven’t seen Speed and now I know I never should because it could be years before I get another goodnight’s sleep. In order to drive a bus and do it well, you must drive so close to objects that it seems like you’re going to hit them, and you must have an incredible sense of the size of the vehicle you’re controlling. I consider myself a good driver, but I know the bus is entirely beyond my capabilities. It’s unlikely this scenario will ever present itself, but if it does, I hope all of the other cars are off the road that day. What if I am driving a bus with a gas leak? That would be the worst day ever.

2. Having an intersexed child. I have seen many a documentary when a child was born with ambiguous genitalia, or due to a medical error, had his genitals damaged. It was a common procedure to “turn” the child into one sex or another by surgically altering whatever was there into girl or boy parts. This method was met with disastrous results when children grew up feeling that they were born in the wrong body, and identified with the opposite gender. The psychological and physical torture that results is incomprehensible, and I am terrified that I could be faced with the decision to determine a child’s gender. As many as 4 in 1,000 children are born with issues like these. Luckily, medical knowledge and technology have improved a lot since cases like Dr. Money’s infamous experiment, but the fact remains that you can’t raise a genderless child, and difficult choices get made. Just another reason to adopt!

1. Fish. This is probably the most illogical of my fears, and that is saying something when you look at this list. Strangely, sharks, sting rays, and other legitimately threatening aquatic creatures do not bother me in the least. Instead, it is guppies, trout, and those hellish demons that look like oceanic dinosaurs that make my skin crawl. I hate fish. They are barely even animals. You can ask my brother Michael B., and he will tell you that I ruined his first ever catching time a fish because I had an anxiety attack the second he reeled it in. We were fishing in Maine when he snagged a little sunfish, brought it into the canoe to admire it, and it flopped off the hook and directly under my feet. My screams echoed through the cove while he paddled furiously back to our dock. Pictures of the event show my terrified face, ankles raised high in the air, paralyzed by the idea that the fish would somehow jump onto my face. So no, I do not like fish. And don’t get me started on restaurants that think it’s charming and serene to put a 50-gallon fish tank next to my table. I’d rather find a spider in my food.