Facing My Fear Straight In Its Horrible Lava Face
December 30, 2014
So a few Christmases ago, Jason thought it would be "funny" to buy me a DVD copy of "Hill of Fire," the infamous Reading Rainbow episode that inadvertently triggered my lifelong phobia of volcanoes. He figured I — as a mostly reasonable, somewhat mature adult — would be able to watch it, laugh about it, maybe get a good blog post out of the experience, like the time I watched a terrible reenactment of Pompeii. Maybe it would even help!, he reasoned. I never managed to write that good blog post because I never made it through the entire show. He put it on and I kept having to leave the room. It was just like I remembered, and for some reason the realization that my childhood memories weren't NEARLY as warped as I assumed made the whole thing worse. It wasn't funny. It was HORRIBLE, and Jason learned a valuable lesson about maaaaaaybe taking people's most irrational fears a bit more seriously, and that no, I really wasn't making things up or exaggerating the depth of my volcanic terror: That show fucked my shit up proper, dude. Well, he learned that lesson for awhile, and then apparently forgot, because... Read more →