You are currently browsing all entries tagged with 'Fear'

Fear vs. Greed

  • April 3, 2012 4:19 am

You’re driving along the highway when you see cash fluttering in the air like flakes in a snow globe.

Up ahead you see the source of this unseasonal snowfall: an armored truck with its back door wide open, continuing to drive on, its drivers blissfully unaware that they’re leaking cold hard cash.

What do you do?

Ignore the money and drive on?

Stop and grab as much as you can?

Grab that cash and turn it in to the armored truck company?

Or, drive on, then spend the night twisting and turning, wondering why the hell you didn’t stop and grab some of those $50 bills that fate was practically begging you to take?  Read more...

Private Fears in Public Spaces

  • May 11, 2011 12:05 am

Here’s the unofficial sequel to Alfredo’s “The OTHER Stage Fright.” I was born a cat. I could only pee and shit in my own bathroom and had trouble using public bathrooms ever since I could remember as a kid.

At 6, it didn’t help that my Toilet Nazi first grade teacher Ms. Wong made such a stink about kids going to the toilet (that was what we called a bathroom in Hong Kong) in the middle of her class. I was so scared to ask permission that one day in her English class I absolutely had to go but by the time I raised my hand I was already too late.

“What, Quentin?” She looked at me.

“Ms. Wong… I peed in my pants,” I said.

“What?” I could still remember the horrified expression on her face.

“I peed in my pants!”

The whole class laughed. I was sent home immediately and that incident certainly sent a message to her and the school. For the next week, she instituted mandatory bathroom breaks every twenty minutes. She would even have us stand in a line and check our pants and skirts to make sure that we didn’t pee in our pants. And for the rest of the year, she made sure that no one would feel unwelcome to use the loo.  Read more...

A moment of fear featuring ducks.

  • March 10, 2011 12:00 am

“Please do not feed the animals.”

Go to just about any park with a healthy bird population and you’ll see that simple request.  In fact, you’ve probably already seen it before in one way or another and you may have detected that this is less a request and more a warning.

And if this is indeed the case, then you will already be ten steps ahead of me.  The me from a week ago, that is.

The me from a week ago went on an excursion to the local park with a friend after getting a snack.  Neither of us had much of an appetite so leftovers aplenty sat in the car as we explored.

Just as we tired of the largely passive entertainments of the locale, my friend and I noticed the cacophonous calls of ducks.

 Read more...

Apeirophobia (The Fear of Infinity) & Other Unusual Phobias

  • March 8, 2011 12:01 am

I was enjoying a pleasant brunch with a friend this past weekend when we ran into an old pal of hers named “Tom” who is an actor and a regular cast member on a hit TV show. We invited Tom to join us and he accepted.

Soon, we were enjoying our food and engaging in the standard industry small talk when the discussion somehow took a more interesting turn. Tom told us he was suffering from apeirophobia, which he explained to us was the fear of infinity.

Fear of infinity? I had never heard that one before. I’m familiar with a lot of the more common phobias and I have a minor fear of heights myself, but this sounded, well…weird.

So how does a fear of infinity manifest itself?  Read more...

the wisdom of a crouton tooth

  • January 28, 2010 12:45 am

My wisdom teeth haunt me.  I know that they are there, just waiting to attack when I least expect it.  I liken them to hidden landmines in my mouth with age and time as the tripwire which will eventually set them off.  When will they make their presence known is anyone’s guess.  But when they do, I hear the pain is greater than being kicked in the head by a feral donkey.

I paid a visit to the dentist last month after not having gone for over 3 years.  I shivered in fear during the whole oral ordeal like a nervous brownie before her first cookie sale.  Total damage?  A few bucks, 3 small cavities, and one erupted wisdom tooth that must be extracted asap.  Uckfay.

 Read more...

Original Offenders: Esther Wong

  • November 29, 2009 12:38 am

My fellow Offender Alfredo reminded me in his last post of how hot Debbie Harry is. And that made me think of the time I saw her live at a small Los Angeles club called Madame Wong’s West which I can pinpoint as the night I entered puberty (more on this later). But I would not have had that experience if it were not for Esther Wong a.k.a. the “Godmother of Punk.”

MadameWongBorn in Shanghai in 1917, Wong immigrated to the United States in 1949. In the 1970s and ‘80s, she owned two restaurants/clubs—Madame Wong’s in L.A.’s Chinatown and Madame Wong’s West in Santa Monica—that became the beacon for some of the greatest punk and rock n’ roll bands of the era.  Read more...