biography of phobias

The end of the semester seems like the perfect time to reflect briefly on my personal relationship with the world. What better way to do this than via the things that freak me out?

1. Fear: Choking on food. Source: I remember getting freaked out by choking after learning about it and the Heimlich maneuver in school. I used to dream both about choking and about not being able to Heimlich someone who was choking.

2. Fear: brain tumor. Source: In my high school Thanatology course (i.e., death and dying), we watched a documentary about someone with terminal cancer. I remember that the film was about a woman who had some sort of brain cancer. She had lost all of her hair and the side of her skull had caved in. The caved in skull freaked me out.

3. Fear: lightning. Source: I now live in one of the most active lightning areas in the world. When Yidg and I were on campus for the first time (getting IDs and all that) there was a storm and a professor was struck dead. People are struck dead every year. And we get a lot of sudden thunderstorms. You should see the frantic sprint I will take from car to front door when it is storming.

4. Fear: murky bodies of water. Source: there are two from my formative years. The first was the movie Jaws. This has to do with not being able to see the things in the water that will take a big bite of flesh off my body. The second one (another source of nightmares like choking) was what seemed like endless warnings in the 70s about swimming in ponds or lakes and getting caught in the underwater plant life and drowning. So, I guess this is two fears: drowning and getting eaten by aquatic wildlife.

5. Fear: being an untalented scholar. Source: the disparity between getting heaps of praise and high expectations in my graduate program and the reality of high volume rejections/mysterious requirements of blind review journal publishing. From this dissonance between praise and rejection, I have developed a fear of writing.

updated to add:

6. Highschool fear: herpes (pre-AIDS). Those sex ed classes freaked me out about herpes. Because it was permanent and painful and you had to wear it on your face like a badge of shame (and that was the good kind of herpes).

the medium is the message; or, whither the shame of formality?

Several people among our academic blogging group has expressed frustration at the gibberish shorthand of text messaging that has increasingly overtaken student emails that seemingly shoul dbe more formal. So, to extend the discussion, I submit the following email that I received today 2.5 hours after my final exam ended. It was sent, of course, by someone in the class who failed to show up.

Quoting a student who I think is in a position where formality is paramount:

"hello.

im sry to announce but i just realized this mornign that my early morning exam overlapped with yours, and i thought i would finish early and then come to take yours, but i didnt, and i didnt know wat to do, then i had to turn around and have an exam from 1-3 so i couldnt notify anyone. is there any way possible for me to make up this exam?? thank you so much for understanding."


I would like to add that the final exams scheduled at my time slot were only available for courses that met at 11:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So, the only way I can see that there was a conflict is if the student was taking two courses that were scheduled at the same time (barring, of course, a teacher who decided to make up his or her own exam schedule).

If you don't have the time or energy to actually spell out full words (I will and always do forgive the occassional typo),. it becomes very hard to take you seriously. Sry dude, you need a bttr stry.