Be Excellent To Each Other

i used to be dead scared of spiders.. Not any more though! Having a garage full of them helped.

Spiders for me definately.
How can such a small body have that many huge legs ? They just look freak-ish to me and they always seem to appear in the places I least want to see them (ie. in the bath-tub when I'm having a shower).

Also Wasps : Never bothered me until one stung me in the back of the neck years ago for no good reason at all. It was bloody painful !
Since then I've made plenty of embarrasing jerk-reaction physical movements trying to get away from them, often much to the amusement of passers-by.....

My fear of spiders is odd. My friend had two tarantulas, however you spell it, one of them was excellently called Bastard. These freaked me out at first but I then bacame used to them enough to touch, but not hold them, and they could be out while we were in his room. An average sized house spider scuttling accross my room, however, is new trousers time.

But oddly not harvest spiders. A few of which helped curb an ant problem I had.

I don't have any phobias, as I am not a mentalist. I tend to jump when things buzz by my ear, but flinching from and lashing out from a sudden noise close to your ear is hardly irrational, and I certainly don't get any paralysing fear.

Flying. I'm not sure why, I never used to have a problem with it, but on the way back from my Honeymoon I was convinced we were going to crash and die. Now I can't even look at a plane in the sky without feeling uneasy.
On a flight to Germany last year, I ate so many 'calming' sweets that I got jaw ache. They didn't help.

I'm not fond of spiders - it's just the way they move that bothers me. I wouldn't be half so scared if they were a bit slower.

Also, I have to have my feet covered up when I am in bed, even though I can lay without any covering on any other body part. I can't explain this, but I know my friend's mother is exactly the same.

And I'm getting worse as I get older. My first time flying, fact fans, was standing on the flight deck of a Hercules being piloted by one of the rare female RAF pilots and we were doing loops (take off, loop, land, coast, crack throttles, take off again, two hours) at RAF Lyneham and I was taking pictures - I was spoiled basically because she was so smooth I barely noticed the touch downs on about 90% of the landings. Commercial flights - the only reason most of their landings are so crap is down to the pilots finding it amusing to dump the fucking plane on the tarmac and time contraints. I KNOW it's safe, but it still absolutely petrifies me to the point where I'm a barely controlled mess of nerves by the time the plane starts taxiing.

When I was at Goodwood in the summer they had one of those new too big to be in the air airbuses or whatever they're called flying over the house as we got there, and I refused to get any closer until the ungainly monstrosity they were obviously putting through it's paces had fucked off out of the airspace

Grim: I am slowly getting worse at flying aswell. I also have no idea why. When I was a kid turbulance used to make me yell "weeeee", now I sit quietly gripping the seat handles. The landing on the way back from my trip to Germany this year was a right pants pooper. The plane just seemed to quiver and lurch towards the ground. I cannot watch anything to do with air crashes. This is making me feel funny right now as I may have to go to New York this year.


(in edit)
Dammit Snappa you made almost the same post

Bees and Wasps are a silly thing I'm afraid of. Not too bothered by spiders. Don't like them much but I don't fear them terribly.

I don't have clownophobia but I couldn't help sniggering when a clown came to my stall and asked for the friday the 13th films. He didn't see what was so funny.

Repeat after me:

A Clown is my friend. A clown will not bite me and throw me in the basement.

I'm also a little apprehensive about windows in the dark when inside.

spiders can fuck off. wasps too. wasps aren't a phobia. those fuckers will sting you. that's pretty rational as far as fears go.

I wouldn't call it a phobia as such but midgets freak me the fuck out if I'm trapped in an office with them. I found that out when I had to work with one. that walk. those teeth. it's like they'd cross-bred a spider with a clown. I'm not a fan.

Yeah and fuckin' dwarfs too.

Nah we don't

bees and wasps. the other day i almost had a car crash because of it.

I'm not too fond of spiders either. Anyone who prefers to have a spider as pet instead of a cute kitty, should be killed.

Not for me. Bee stings Mimi = Mimi goes to hospital with anaphylactic shock. If I don't, I could die.

You ever seen 'My Girl'?

Yeah, but in that Maculay Culkin died, which was only a good thing.

But that might've happened to me if it wasn't for a random stranger that found me looking not so well in a field when I was a nipper

Ooh, mirrors. Not a massive fear or anything, but if I think about it while I look into them, I start to feel uneasy.
Obviously I'm going to see "Mirrors" when it comes out, and it'll probably put me off them for life.

I dont really have any fears, because Im nails but really if someone was telling me to hold there snake/spider/scorpion etc for half an hour while they do a bungee jump or something Id proabbly say fuck that.

I start to feel uneasy if I look at you for a while too.

There's nothing frightening about clowns. It became quite trendy to say, "Oh, I'm afraid of clowns!!! OMG!!!" sometime in the mid-90s; as if, by admitting to a characterful phobia, people might, by extension, see the self-professed suffer as strange in a 'zany', intriguing sense of the word.

If anything, clowns are quite sad creatures; forever locked, as they are, in the act of exchanging currency for joy. (Quick self-promotion URL: http://www.tinyhorsey.co.uk/features/th ... yface.html.)

There are scary clowns though, obv - Pennywise being a case in point. Clowns are an excellent thing to make look scary (giving them sharp teeth, demon eyes and violent tendancies) as the irony of a force-for-good-turned-bad is jarring.

I am immediately suspicious of a person if they say they're afraid of clowns. I begin to think they might be a bit silly in the head.

seeing malia stare back at me in a mirror.

Clowns indeed aren't scary, although my mum had a painting of one which was a bit moody to be honest. To be fair though, I mentioned them because they are clearly an ingredient in midgets.

Damned lies!

Clowns make me miserable and I haven't seen a penny.

I thought I was the only one. Been mocked for it enough.

Fear of bees is silly - they're pretty docile and move in an obvious manner, and are quite charming.

Wasps, though, are totally evil. Genuinely sadistic, vicious little gits who hover in attack patterns around anyone and sting them just for kicks.

I'm always rather unsettled by that that slow, stalking walk that cats do. It's horribly sly-looking, but beyond that I've no idea why I will always try to interrupt them when they do it. Shady cunts.

Definitely spiders, the loathsome little fuckers. And I recently found out I'm not terribly keen on enclosed spaces either, thanks to a rather nasty MRI experience. Suffice to say they'll have to sedate the hell out of me before they get me near one of those godawful machines again. I think it's more a deep-seated fear of being buried alive, rather than claustrophobia though, and being inside the MRI machine was pretty much exactly how I'd imagine the inside of a coffin would be like.

It doesn't help I learned a lot of things they don't report about air travel during my tenure at an airport... not least of all that it's not unheard of for tires to burst during a particularly harsh landing.

I too am freaked out a bit by commercial airliner landings now because of this - it seems that lately the style has been to obviously come down a lot heavier on one side rather than trying to get both sets of rear undercarriage to touch down at once.

I have a mate who has a genuine phobia of buttons (as in clothing fasteners, not the chocolate sweets or the pantomime character). This sounds like it wouldn't make a big difference to his life, but he can't wear shirts and has to choose all his clothes very carefully accordingly.

Hate, absolutely hate injections. Even seeing them on TV turns my stomach.

Imagine my joy then at having to have 4 local anaesthetic injections into my eyelids one time.

I dislike bad things happening to fingers. It all stems from a Mad Magazine articles where they talked about deformities caused by modern life, including compressed cheeks caused by resting your face in your hands while watching TV too much. The illustrating in particular was called 'finger feet' and was supposedly the result of 'letting your fingers do the walking... too heavily'. Basically, imagine tips of your fingers (the entire joint) bend at a 90 degree angle to the rest of the finger. Ever since seeing that, I've been able to visualize it happening to myself.

Suffice it to say, scenes like Mulder getting his finger snapped in The X-Files, Deckard getting his fingers dislocated in Blade Runner and the cigar cutter scene in Mission Impossible 2 made me wince ten times more than a normal person.

Likewise, when I was about 10 a friend grabbed my fingers and wouldn't let go, so I bloodied his nose.

Agree with injections. Footage of man's inhumanity to man I'm ok with. Someone sticking a needle into skin makes me winch.

I'm not too keen on squid or octopuses but we have an agreement in which I don't descend to murky undersea caves and they don't drink at FFMC.

Entirely true. I do this as well.

Also: telephones. Hate them. Hate talking on them. I make Mrs Chris answer the phone or phone people for me - even if it's just to call the takeaway. I think we had a long thread about this a while ago, though, as it seems surprisingly common.

I have a phobia of moths, which used to be incredibly bad, but is getting a lot better now. I even let a small one sit on my finger for a bit a few weeks ago, which would have been unthinkable only a year or two ago. I think if a proper big moth ever came into the house I'd still be paralysed and terrified, though.

And I'm another person who's getting worse at flying. Used to love it, but now I find myself tense and nervous before and during any flight I have to take. I think that started after spending a summer cleaning planes at Stansted airport and getting to see them up close. They're the equivalent of sputtering, rattling old minicabs, rather than lovely new shiny London cabs. (And I'm not sure I'd ever fly Ryan Air, after seeing the state they keep their planes in - or kept their planes in at the time. I'm not joking when I say bits used to come off in my hands when I cleaned the interiors. Not important things - just bits of the seats or the overhead compartments - but if those parts are that bad, I don't trust the rest.)

And I used to hate telephones, but I'm better now.

Having done part of an aeronautical engineering degree prior to switching to law, I really should be more scared of flying than I am, given that I know something about how the things are made. Clue - toasters are made with more accuracy.

The maintenance thing is also a bit scary, yes. One of the major budget air freight companies had a plane fall in half on take off not too long ago.

Is that why you don't look behind you any more when we're having sex?

The planes take a bashing from careless baggage handlers accidentally driving their little trucks into the access panels and engines and such, Teh Rev.

The best thing I ever saw was when we were taking a disabled passenger up to the door of a MyTravel A321 on the ambulift - a truck that could raise its entire body on a scissor platform so as to allow us to put wheelchairs onto a plane that wasn't on an airbridge (or in this case, to avoid blocking the airbridge on the other side)

The cleaners were the only ones insured to manhandle the passengers and to operate the ambulift. The cleaner (who looked like Tim Edwards from PC Gamer) started the thing rising up, not realizing he'd parked it slightly too close to the plane. Now, on larger aircraft, the doors retract slightly and then go inside the fuselage. But the A321 is smaller, so the door swings out sideways instead a bit like the door on a minivan. The handrails on one side of the platform at the front of the ambulift went right underneath this door and started pushing it upwards. The hinge-arm-things were straining and the door started to twist sideways, as we all shouted at this thick twat to stop raising the fucking platform already, you're breaking the fucking plane.

The first officer examined it and determined that it still closed okay, so the plane went without any problems, but the cleaners got a right bollocking for it.

You're all saying this stuff to shit me up before my 9 hour flight tomorrow, right?

Are you afraid of incandescent ones only, or both those and compact fluorescent? How about LED?

I <3 lightbulbs, I used to collect the cardboard wrappers off them when I was a child.

You are getting married? That was fast! Does he know about it?

Ace, you are very naughty, sometimes.

They can explode on their own, interestingly. It doesn't happen very often, but you end up standing in the doorway with your hair full of bits of glass wondering if it's safe to open your eyes.