Irrational Fears!

Some fears in life are irrational. Like clowns. I don't really get how people are afraid of clowns unless you were exposed to that Stephen King novel at a young age, in which case I can see it. One of my irrational fears, for example, is that one day I'll be walking underneath one of those parking booth arms, and the thing will come crashing down on top of my head. I seriously think about this every time I see them.

I choose to walk around them. Never under them.

Some fears, however, are not irrational. My very much rational fear is, of course, one thing and one thing only.

Spiders.

There is nothing irrational about being afraid of something with 13 eyes and 48 legs that scuttle terrifyingly towards you and that create death traps for other insects to mistakenly fly into so that they can be wound up in a web where they'll eventually become food. See? When I describe it like that, it's perfectly rational!

Unfortunately for yours truly, Japan is full of 蜘蛛 (or kumo, which happens to be the same word for cloud. Freaking CLOUD. Seriously, I don't understand having the same word for something that's fluffy and happy as for something that horror movies are made of). It's something about their climate that allows the little bastards to thrive.

I don't like it.

The Japanese, however, don't seem to really consider them a big deal. I don't know what kind of psychotropic drugs they're on, but I don't blame them.

You see, back in 2006 when I was in Japan, I had a near fatal episode. Here I am, happily coming home from a long day of sight seeing. The sun is shining, I had a number of excellent photos on my camera, and I had just had a bunch of sake with some friends and at this exact moment I manage to wander right through some spider's giant web of death and destruction. I mean, the thing had me! It was all over my face, on my clothes, and the only thing I could think was that I was instantly covered in at LEAST twenty thousand tiny spiders that were going to eat me alive.

Like hell you will! Screaming "KUMO! KUMO!" (to warn anyone nearby of the immediate danger) I come crashing through the front door of my host family's house trying to RIP my shirt off over my head in their entry way just so I can escape the inevitable flesh eating bugs I'm most certainly covered in ....... and I do this in plain sight of my entire host family who had just sat down to dinner. Including the grandmother.

They were giving me the blankest stares on the face of the planet. I stammered out a "Th--there was a spider," as I tried to get my tangled up web shirt back on, but they really didn't seem to really grasp the urgency of the situation.

The next day their thirteen year old daughter showed me how to walk with my umbrella open in front of me so that I would not have a repeat of the previous day's event.



...There was a point to this entry.

Oh yeah.

So of course since I wanted to prepare for the worst, I decide for some reason that googling "Japan spiders" is a fantastic idea, and of course I come across this:

NOT COOL, JAPAN. 

NOT COOL.