In honor of Halloween, a random list of stuff that scares me

I’m afraid of going broke and never being able to pay off my student loans. I’m afraid my child will hate me when she grows up. I’m afraid of the dentist, the IRS, and terrorist attacks, in that order. I’m afraid I’ll run into my ex-husband when I haven’t washed my hair in six days. I’m afraid no one will ever want to look at me naked again. I’m afraid of car accidents and anything involving airplanes. I’m afraid of clay-mation. I’m afraid of rolling over onto my stomach in the middle of the night and squashing my baby. I’m afraid of getting athlete’s foot. Oh, and you know that show “The Ghost Whisperer” on CBS? I know it’s supposed to be about Jennifer Love Hewitt’s boobs, but it scares the poo out of me.

Halloween

It’s Halloween, and here’s a scary thought. I’m 33 years old right now, but I’ll be 34 on December 2nd. I’ll graduate this June, then do research in Thailand for a year, providing I get a grant. That means I’ll be 35 when I return to the U.S., a homeless, unemployed single mom. This I can handle, but here’s where it gets scary. It’ll take me a while to take a bar exam and get a job when I return, so I’ve asked my parents if I can move in with them until I get settled. They said yes without even hesitating (I adore them), but I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that I’m moving in with my parents at the age of 35. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it, or that the circumstance don’t justify it, it’s just, well, weird. I moved out when I was 17 and never moved back in, even for a summer.

Also, I think it’s ironic in kind of a bad way that at the age of 30 I was a high school graduate making $70k a year with full benefits, but after putting forth a superhuman effort to educate myself and improve my life I’m $100k in debt, unemployed and living with my parents. Now that's a scary thought.

Brazil irritates me

It wasn’t until recently that hordes of my male friends began visiting Brazil and coming back to rave about it for hours on end, droning on and on about a place I’ve never been and truly have very little desire to visit. If this isn’t tiresome enough, usually somewhere in the middle of the conversation I’m jerked from my boredom-induced stupor when I hear something like, “…and even the worst, ugliest Brazilian woman is ten times more beautiful, more sexy, more wonderful and more perfect than even the most perfect woman in America.”

For lack of a better explanation, in the words of E.M. Forster: “When a man has said to me, ‘So-and-so’s a pretty girl,’ I am seized with a momentary sourness against So-and-so, and long to tweak her ear.”

Pumpkin angelfood cake

My unbearable mustard craving was replaced with an equally unbearable craving for mandarin oranges in a can, so I finally bit the bullet and went to the grocery store. As proof that it's a bad idea for pregnant women to go grocery shopping, I bought five cans of mandarin oranges, coconut milk, bacon, green beans, cheese in a can, artichoke hearts, and a seriously disgusting concoction called "pumpkin angel cake." Who thought pumpkin angel cake would be a good thing to cook, much less foist off on the general public? And who but me would buy the vile thing, and upon buying it, actually eat an entire piece before determining that what I'm eating tastes like pumpkin flavored toilet paper? The scary thing is that I'll probably develop a craving for this monstrous dish a month from now.

Craving mustard

Today while aimlessly scrolling through my list of friends on facebook, I noticed that my friend Will's profile picture shows him standing next to someone dressed in a mustard costume. I found myself looking at that picture and thinking, mmm... mustard... wouldn't that be good? I wandered into my kitchen and quickly located three jars of mustard, but of course nothing to put the mustard on. Opening the jar and simply smelling the mustard didn't help. I told myself I would just take a little taste on the end of a spoon, but then remembered the "slippery slope" concept (sorry to all the non-law students out there - look it up on wikipedia). I had an image of myself sitting on my kitchen floor with mustard smeared all over my face and my fist stuck in a French's jar and changed my mind. I'm now munching, quite unsatisfactorily, on crackers and peanut butter, which will give me raging heartburn in less than an hour. I'm going to file this one under the joys of pregnancy.

Sit-ups are a waste of time

As it turns out, all those years I spent performing unnatural feats of acrobatics to keep my stomach flat were for nothing. Apparently, guys actually prefer girls with big fat bellies rolling out their shirts and obscuring the waistbands of their pants. Case in point. Even though I'm five months pregnant, I still just look like a skinny girl with a great big paunch. Although it's embarrassing to walk around looking like Dom Deluise stuffed into Britney Spears' wardrobe, I often find my belly hanging out the bottom of my shirt. Still, the bigger my paunch gets, the more guys wolf whistle at me on the street and try to pick me up in the Whole Foods.

By the way, if anyone tries to tell me these guys are actually attracted to my "pregnant glow," I'm going to do them some serious harm. I'm convinced that the "pregnant glow" is another completely non-existent myth of pregnancy, along with a plethora of other lies society feeds us about pregnancy that I'll get into another day. I've never looked worse than I do right now, with dull and lifeless hair and skin that's flaky and dry. Not to mention the fact that the pregnancy hormones have screwed with my normally sunny (ha ha) disposition to the point where I positively emanate hostility wherever I go. No, I'm convinced that the new attention from strange guys can be traced directly to my large paunch, which proves my theory that sit- ups are a waste of time.

This just in

This just in from the Associated Press: "Recent tests have shown that a brain-eating amoeba is in Tucson's water supply, but experts say the microscopic bug doesn't pose any health risks."