For most of you familiar with me, you know I started a site a while back called FEAR Realized. I talk about it a bit in my About page. You may also know that I killed FEAR because I didn’t want to focus on those issues so much as learn how to overcome them. T’was a slippery slope. Now I’m here, learning how to live – fear or no fear – and I don’t regret my decision to lay the axe to the old site.
If you know me personally, you know there is nothing I love more than a good laugh. Aside from dwelling on my issues (or, at least, trying not to), I use laughter as a form of psychological rehabilitation. It used to be, before I had kids, that I loved a good scare. Oddly enough, scares used to make me laugh, too. Most notably, watching other people get scared. Have kids and the desire of wanting to be scared on purpose seems to fall out through your uterus with them.
Sorry. Too much? Could have said placenta. I was thisclose. You just don’t know.
Because children have ruined my life, I can’t watch scary movies without watching them with someone more scary than me. I have nightmares without this setup firmly in place. This is where my mother can be counted on 100% of the time. My grandmother, were she not so up in age, would be another candidate. Laughing is paramount. Scary, bad. Laughing, yay!
I am born the day before Halloween, so scary movies were kind of my thing. On my birthday and Halloween, television stations – local and cable – would drum up their scariest fare, and I was front and center. One Halloween Eve night, during a Massacre Movie Marathon (not sure if that was the official name but, you know, go with it), The Howling was on. Why these two batty women – the biggest chickens this side of the Midwest – not only volunteered to watch the movie, but decided it was an even better idea to watch the movie WITH THE LIGHTS OUT, I will never know.
During one pivotal scene, a girl, hiding in an empty office, is accosted by a displaced limb falling from a high cabinet – a sign that ish was about to get real. I remember this scene vividly, not because of the limb. Not because of the anticipation from knowing the twit was only inches from a werewolf, and would soon be a goner. Not from biting my nails with fear. I remember this scene vividly because it was at this precise moment when my grandmother interjected with a high, drawn out shrill in the key of “WHOOOOOOAAAAA LAWD JEEEEESUS!”
And I could not. Stop. Laughing.
A few moments ago, my mother – who knows well of my penchant for laughing at the distressed – made the mistake of telling me about a girl who works for Ellen Degeneres. A girl who is put in horrifying predicaments for the sheer notion of gaining audience entertainment due to her hysterical reactions.
A girl who was just asked, by Ellen, to attend a private viewing of the recent Scream 4 release. By herself…
Readers. I have never wanted to own a pair of Depends so badly in all my life as I have right now.
You can call Ellen crazy. Cruel, even. How could someone who knows they have a friend – nay, colleague and subordinate – who is afraid of just about everything under the sun, intentionally keep setting them up to be scared just for their own sick, twisted self-satisfaction? Not once…
(Sidenote: I have only been able to watch this in its entirety once because I laugh so hard I cannot breath. I have to crawl away from the computer. My stomach muscles seize. At one point, my co-workers thought I was crying. Like “Call the priest, she might need counseling” crying.)
Not twice…
…but so many times, the girl needs to have her own show. I would watch it.
Also? I have totally found my new scary movie-watching partner. Writer Amy? Call me, girl.
~HD
monnik April 21, 2011 at 2:19 pm
Bwahaha. *wiping tears*
I don’t like getting scared, but I do like laughing at people who are freaked out. I saw a video on facebook (it was in spanish, but I didn’t need to understand the words) of some kind of tv show that planted a little girl in a white dress in the middle of a hotel hallway late at night. Watching the hotel guests round the cornere to the hallway to see this girl just standing there was the funniest damn thing in the world. Most of them freaked the hell out. Hahaha.
I’m due with kid #4 on Halloween. I know chances aren’t great that it’ll actually be born on that day, but I think it would be cool. Just think of the birthday parties and all of the kids we could scare!!
dmarie April 24, 2011 at 10:38 pm
Nuh-uh, get the heck outta here! Congratulations lady! Terrible me, I have been consumed with life and have not been checking up on my Internet buddy. I’m terrible, I know. So terrible, in fact, I’ve begun a new hash tag… #iSuck.
Is it selfish of me to hope the baby is born on 10/30? It probably is. I’m doin’ it anyway. HA!
Vicky April 21, 2011 at 10:51 am
I absolutely HATE scary movies. On the nights that Captdon is on duty at the fire dept, if a scary movie commercial comes on, I change the channel. Thats how much of a chicken I am. I used to watch them before I had kids but as with you, that changed the moment they were born! If I do watch something even kinda scary, I watch it through my fingers!
dmarie April 24, 2011 at 10:41 pm
Well now you’re just torturing yourself watching that stuff without Captdon in the house!
You and my mother need to talk. Seriously. She will still purposely watch scary movies just to watch them through her fingers and ask me “What happened?”