When the topic of fear comes up, I know without a doubt what mine is.
Eels. Silly? Yeah. Unreasonable? Probably. Real? You bet. I imagine that my fear of eels stems from The Princess Bride, one of my favorite movies that I watched incessantly in my youth. Princess Buttercup, at one point, launches herself off the side of her captors' boat into black waters. Her squeaky-voiced theif warns her of them... She keeps swimming... You see the humps of their back surface and submerge again, and all of a sudden, their high-pitched squeals... Shrieking Eeels!
(At this point I hide under a blanket, clutching the person closest to me or a large pillow).
Eels make me so uncomfortable, every time the word comes up I have to touch or rub the arches of my feet. I have no idea why, I just have an overwhelming compulsion to do so. As I write, my feet are writhing against each other under my desk to make me feel better and finish writing this blog. I suppose it's the fear that they're going to bite my feet. That probably comes from years of swim team and the occasional creeping thought that there was something behind me as I crossed into the deep end.
I love the ocean more than anything and just try to block the thought from my head. In a sort of weird obsession I've had with eel-kind, I researched them and know that they live in little eel caves or eel pits in reefs, so I won't have to worry about them on the coast, probably.
I also know they can grow to be 13 feet long, which makes me want to cry and rub the arches of my feet all day.
