{"id":858,"date":"2005-06-06T23:32:13","date_gmt":"2005-06-07T03:32:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/2005\/06\/06\/i-have-a-confession-to-make\/"},"modified":"2009-10-03T06:26:51","modified_gmt":"2009-10-03T11:26:51","slug":"i-have-a-confession-to-make","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/2005\/06\/06\/i-have-a-confession-to-make\/","title":{"rendered":"I have a confession to make."},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div><p>I have a deep-seated, blinding fear of bug&#8230;photographs.<\/p>\n<p>Bugs themselves?  no problem (well, except for cockroaches which are just gross on any level).  I know how to wield a hard-soled shoe like the best of them.  That time that we had a bizarre fly infestation in the country house, leaving me, in my glasses-less almost blind state to step into the shower and to hear them practically crunching under my feet?  I had the presence of mind to get redressed before screaming for my dad.  That scorpion <em>inside my suitcase<\/em> in Mexico?  Sure, I stood on a rock and yelled for Daryl, the bartender-slash-scorpion expert, but that was the correct response, because otherwise I couldn&#8217;t keep an eye on it to make sure that it didn&#8217;t scurry into, like, my bed.  Heck, growing up my room was in the basement (don&#8217;t get me wrong, it was a cool room because I had the <em>entire<\/em> basement), and spiders were constantly showing up for my cat to kill.  or stare at for hours.  Never bothered me.<\/p>\n<p>But watch me flip a page in a book and come across a photograph of an insect?  and you&#8217;re next watching me run from the room trying not to vomit.  Even when I was a little kid, and I got my first world book encyclopedia, I&#8217;d come across a photograph of an ant or a fly, and I had to turn my head and oh-so-gently flip the page over by the very corner, so that I wasn&#8217;t even <em>touching<\/em> the picture of the bug.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know where this comes from.  I know it&#8217;s completely and totally irrational.  But that didn&#8217;t stop my heart from beating through my chest when the NY Times Magazine <a target=\"NewWindow\" href=\"http:\/\/query.nytimes.com\/gst\/abstract.html?res=F20D10F93B5E0C768EDDAE0894DC404482&amp;incamp=archive:search\">ran a photo of giant cockroaches<\/a> a few months ago (article abstract only, it&#8217;s too old, but the intro paragraph gives a nice sense of the article).<\/p>\n<p>I only bring this up now because yesterday, in all of the brouhaha over the whole fruit-fly gender reassignment thing, the Times decided to publish, on the front page of it&#8217;s website, <a target=\"NewWindow\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/06\/03\/science\/03cell.html?ex=1275451200&amp;en=aa3fa231094d393c&amp;ei=5090&amp;partner=rssuserland&amp;emc=rss\">a super-magnified picture of a fruit-fly<\/a>.  I had to avert my eyes and shut down my browser.  And then I refused to go back and read the Times for the rest of the day.<\/p>\n<p>Part of me thinks this is all some bizarre latent reaction to the fact that the movie <a target=\"NewWindow\" href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0047573\/combined?fr=c2l0ZT1kZnxteD0yMHxsbT01MDB8dHQ9b258ZmI9dXxwbj0wfHE9dGhlbSF8aHRtbD0xfG5tPW9u;fc=1;ft=123;fm=1\">Them!<\/a> scared me half to death the first time I watched it.  I&#8217;m pretty sure that I couldn&#8217;t have been more than 7 or 8 at the time.<\/p>\n<p>And seriously, I&#8217;m just reading through my newsreader, and <a target=\"NewWindow\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/06\/07\/science\/07roach.html?ex=1275796800&amp;en=8c08184f87ad6706&amp;ei=5090&amp;partner=rssuserland&amp;emc=rss\">here&#8217;s another one<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have a deep-seated, blinding fear of bug&#8230;photographs. Bugs themselves? no problem (well, except for cockroaches which are just gross on any level). I know how to wield a hard-soled shoe like the best of them. That time that we had a bizarre fly infestation in the country house, leaving me, in my glasses-less almost [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[32,10],"class_list":["post-858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-crazy-people","tag-photos"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6ZBi-dQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=858"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2212,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858\/revisions\/2212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}