June 23, 2003

Today is the day to hustle someone at pool.

I lost last Thursday's Zulkey.com. Has anybody seen it? It had to do with my unpublished children's book. I'm stupid.

Zulkey.com will be on vacation today through Wednesday, possibly Thursday, as its proprietress will be on her first business trip ever, to Seattle for the first time ever, and her computer gets fixed. However, I will not leave you without some food for thought.

I was a pretty neurotic kid. Well, maybe neurotic isn't the right word, it's more like 'wimpy.' Every kid has some major fear, whether it's dogs or the dark, but I had two.

First, it was fireworks. I blame my parents for this, because they had basically instilled in me that there are two things to fear in life: motorcycles and fireworks. I had heard about a million stories about how so and so had blown off his fingers or was short an eyeball due to fooling around with firecrackers. This grew in my imagination, however, to the point where I was terrified of fireworks; I was convinced that the embers would fall on me and burn me to death. Our family was in Boston one year for the Fourth of July and I made my dad walk me back to the hotel from the harbor before the fireworks started, which didn't make him happy. The year after the Chicago Bulls won their first championship, they introduced the team by showering some sparklers from the ceiling, and I nearly ran out of Chicago Stadium, leaving a Claire Zulkey-shaped hole in the wall..

I'm better now; fireworks don't scare me at all.

The other, I blame on a bad summer. One season, an unusual amount of people in Chicagoland had been killed by lightning. That particular summer, I was spending my days at an Evanston tradition, Aquatics Camp. After hearing all the warnings about how to avoid getting struck by lightning, I became convinced that I was the next target for a bolt from the sky, due to the aluminum canoes and metals masts in proximity to me on Lake Michigan. I had heard how lightning would sometimes strike from clouds during a fairly light-skied day, so I would panic if I were out on the water and I saw a single cloud in the sky. There were a few times where I remember distinctly panicking while being outdoors during a storm, running, terrified, for shelter.

I'm mostly better now. I can handle being outside while it's lightning out, although I prefer to be indoors during an electrical storm.

So everybody is, or has been afraid of something during their lives. Heights. Bees (oh, don't get me started on bees, although I have a reason for that; I'm allergic). Elevators. Flying. Things touching your eyes.

What are you afraid of? Or what were you afraid of as a kid? Tell me your phobia, where it came from, and work it all on out with a story. It'll be okay. We'll get through this together.