pathological

beetles and spiders and fears - oh my!

you almost pronounced “fears” like “bears,” didn’t ya?

well, at least i did, but i’m a nerd.

Anyway, it seems to me that alot of people are scared of frogs and toads and snakes and creepy crawly things, or scurrying things. Also included in “things” are beetles, spiders, bugs, etc. In every house i’ve ever lived in (i’ve lived in three of them) we have had bugs everywhere like crazy. There were always crickets keeping us company, roly polies to rescue and release back into the backyard, beetles to be disgusted at, you name it - and there still are.

Now it’s not as if we are living in a shack with grape jelly and raw meat spread on the outside to attract the bugs, yet still they come.

I think simply because the bugs were here first, they so totally have a right to come in our house. HOWEVER, after we adopt the ritual of spraying bug poison monthly and flushing every crawling creature down the toilet at first glance, the bugs should not really come back. Bugs do indeed have brains; you would think it’d be like, “OH NO! Bubba died from roach poison! we will never return to the site of his death, lest we meet the same fate!”

But noooo, they always come back.

It’s not that i really mind. I think baby bugs of all sorts are adorable - like this one time, there was this little bitty green bug with huge eyes and i was looking really really closely at it, and it suddenly jumped into my hair. I never found it again either. It was awesome! - and i don’t mind other sterotyped icky creatures, like frogs or toads or snakes. In fact the frogs and toads and snakes are so amusing to me. I pick them up all the time and kiss them just to gross people out. And mice… oh, mice… i love mice… so much…

Now beetles, roaches, bees, wasps, spiders… those i don’t like so much. Spiders, for example, are great fun to watch when they are outside the house. But they have no place inside, except maybe for show and tell at school or a science experiment… or scaring grandma. (just kidding grandma.) Anyway, bugs are really just fine as long as they are outside the house. Even when they wander inside, it’s not that big of a deal. I mean seriously. They aren’t there to scare you, so why waste precious calories having a screaming jumping hissy fit about the spider on the floor? Especially since it’s probably accidental on the spider’s part anyway. I mean, the poor bug is really so much like a little lost tourist in a foreign place. Now as far as i know, Europeans don’t normally react to American tourists by climbing up as high as they can onto taxi cabs and the like screaming, “TOURIST! IT’S A TOURIST! OH MY WORD - SMASH IT! SMASH IT!” so why do we treat bugs like that? Bugs are much smaller and less threatening than tourists anyways.

I think that quite simply, we are just conditioned to fear bugs and creepy or gross things. Theoretically, if you do not ever condition a child to fear anything when he is young, he never will fear anything. Of course it’s impossible to completely avoid conditioning a child, because every experience will be a learning one. But, on a slightly more realistic scale, it is possible to condition children to like some specific things or fear others. This is why some people have pathological phobias of spiders, and others have a life dream of working with spiders whenever possible. This is also why Steve Irwin was so amazing with crocodiles, and other people cannot stand the idea of being a cage with any wild animal, much less a croc. Steve Irwin was partially taught - conditioned - by his father to work with wild animals and raw nature and love every minute of it. We work the same way, even though we may not be Australian. If we see someone react adversely to a mouse when we are young, we grow up “knowing” that mice are bad even if the bad experience wasn’t ours personally. (I heard about someone recently who for some reason had to have multiple surgeries when he was young. For most kids his age it would be a scary experience every time, but this kid wasn’t afraid of surgery at all - in fact he got excited about it - because he didn’t know it had the potential to be scary).

I have always hoped that for the sake of making the next generation brave, parents think about putting aside their fears so that they don’t define their children. That doesn’t mean sheltering their kids, it doesn’t mean their kids will all turn out to be fearless, and, perhaps most importantly, it doesn’t mean children can’t simultaneously be taught to respect things that should be feared, such as nuclear weapons or drugs. In fact i think it would increase the amount of respect people had for truly dangerous things. I also think it would slow down alot of the sterotypes about things that aren’t really dangerous and get kids to learn more about the stuff previous generations were scared of. Wouldn’t it be funny if the default reaction to a mouse or a snake 50 years from now was one of fascination, or if the sight of cigarettes could instantly scatter a group of people? Alot can change in just a few years, so we’ll see [:

Alicia <3

Tags: bravery, bug, bugs, conditioning, creepy, fear, fearless, fears, frogs, gross, mice, nerd, parenting, pathological, snakes, sterotype, Steve Irwin, toads, tourists

Sunday, September 21st, 2008 Things that Make you go Hmm.... No Comments

smiling bugs

on a lighter note, here are some smiley caterpillars to cheer up your day… I sure hope none of you have pathological fears of caterpillars with large fake eyes…

Alicia <3