What Frightens You?

Right now what frightens me is that Tooth No. 19 is a goner. It's coming out as it is cracked, infected, and an all around pain in the mouth. What's coming in its place is an implant, some oral surgery, and a nice hefty price tag (I know how I'm spending my tax surplus check).

Here's a list of phobias (courtesy of the online page-a-day calendar I receive by email every morning). Many of these have to be made up (let's start with the fact that spell check didn't like any of them):

• anthomania - fear of flowers
• balletomania - fear of ballet
• cytheromania - fear of sex
• dromomania - fear of running; roaming
• eleutheromania - fear of freedom
• flagellomania - fear of flogging; beating
• gamomania - fear of marriage; proposing
• hexametromania - fear of writing hexameters
• islomania - fear of islands
• jumbomania - fear of mammoth proportions (or graduates of this university?)
• klopemania - fear of theft
• lypemania - fear of mournfulness
• melomania - fear of music (and the subsets "Mariahmania" and "Madonnamania")
• nostomania - fear of nostalgia
• onomatomania - fear of words; neologisms
• polkamania - fear of dancing polkas (c'mon, who doesn't love a good polka)
• pteridomania - fear of ferns
• rinkomania - fear of ice-skating
• sonnettomania - fear of sonnets
• squandermania - fear of reckless spending (oh, I'm not afraid of it, I'm really good at it)
• timbromania - fear of postage stamps
• uranomania - fear of celestial power
• Whitmania - fear of Walt Whitman
• xenomania - fear of things foreign
• zoomania - fear of animals

Then I received this nugget in my Google Reader about a woman who lives on Staten Island and was afraid of the Verrazano Bridge, once the world's longest suspension bridge. For those of you who aren't familiar with the greater metropolitan NYC area, Staten Island really is an island and you need that bridge to get to Long Island. Then I saw this story in the Poughkeepsie Journal about a planned refurbishment of the Tappan Zee Bridge.

I personally don't like to drive across this bridge, but I am not sure why. It might be the pitch or the fact that you can see through the drains to the water below. I've driven across a lot of bridges. I grew up in New York and that meant bridges (or tunnels - but that's a story for another day). I crossed at least one bridge every day while commuting. When I moved to DC, more water, more bridges (although I didn't cross this bridge for the first time until last fall). For a while, before I moved, I drove across a bridge that was built in the same model as the Minnesota bridge (it was on the Beltway - so it didn't get a lot of traffic, nope). I like bridges, the architecture, the design. I really wanted to cross this bridge when I was in New Orleans and this bridge-tunnel combo is something that I want to do as well.

I am an intelligent person. I understand the bridge is not going to collapse . . .



and yet?