i am neurotic.

If I’m taking a bath instead of a shower, I have to pull the plug after I’m out of the bath. Otherwise, I worry that tiny piranhas will swim up the pipes, through the drain, and into my bath while it’s draining and attack me.

Everytime I get in the water whether it’s an ocean or a pool I panic that there are sharks. Sometimes I panic in my shower.

I don’t know what my parents were thinking but they let me watch the movie Jaws when I was about 8 years old.  Ever since then I’ve had an irrational fear of sharks.  When I would lay in my bed at night, I couldn’t let any body part creep over the edge of the bed for fear that Jaws would come up out of the floor boards and eat my arm or something.  Sometimes I imagined that my bed was actually floating in the ocean.

Forget about swimming too far out in the ocean.  But I was on the swim team as a kid and we would train at the university indoor 50 meter pool. They had a window underwater that let you look into the boiler room and I thought that’s where they kept the sharks.  When I would swim into the deep end, I would race until I got back into the shallow end because I really thought the shark was chasing me.  I thought this until I was about 15.

Once my goldfish died when I was little, somehow it got into my head that my mom had not flushed it down the toilet like she had said, but instead had slipped it into my strawberry milk. I checked for a dead goldfish in my milk every morning for about 2 years.