From the mind of...

I am irrationally afraid of walking up, down or away from dark staircases. Like, I run screaming under my breath like a nerd being chased across the playground by a fat bully. I usually hop into bed, breathing like a 600 pound sumo wrestler and Tim looks at me wondering what in hell I was just doing in the bathroom. Just for fun, I never tell him.

I have come up with a fool proof plan for never eating junk again. 1) I will somehow form a cult and suck in all the people I love, and brainwash them into thinking junkfood is the devil and if you eat it you will become fat, since no one seems to believe it no matter how big their waistline gets and B) I will hide all the junkfood in my house on a dark staircase since they scare the bejesus out of me and there is no way I would risk getting murdered on a dark staircase in my own house for an Oreo. Problem solved.

I keep trying to think back to where this started and I blame my dad. When I was, oh I don't know, 8 years old my parents let us watch the movie Carrie. In case you are wondering, he won the Parent of the Year award that year. Anyway, when the movie was over and I was pretending I wasn't scared as my bottom lip shook, my dad asked me to go in the DARK kitchen to get him a pack of cigarettes out of the drawer. As I did so, he yelled "WATCH OUT FOR THE HAND" (referencing the corpse hand that pops out of the gravel ground at the end of Carrie), and I jumped so high and screamed so loud that I am convinced it stunted my growth and is the reason I never grew over 5'4". I know, one has absolutely nothing to do with the other, but if I am placing blame, I am throwing in a couple of non-relevant things just for good measure.

When I was probably 11 or so, the Nightmare on Elm Street movies came out and for some inexplicable reason I was allowed to watch this too. To this day, that was still one of the scariest movies I have ever seen and Freddie Krueger still haunts my nightmares (or is it daydreams if we are being movie literate here?). In the house we lived in you had to walk through the entire house to access the back stairway that led to the bedrooms upstairs. There was no hall light, nothing to light the staircase, just pure darkness and you had to go on faith and hope Freddie wasn't coming up behind you. At the top of the stairs there was a wooden railing with a small walkway behind it that led to a door to the attic, and this my friend, was my arch nemesis all the years that I lived in that house. I was utterly convinced that Freddie laid in wait and was going to jump up and grab me with his sharp edged knifgers (knife fingers for those of you not proficient in the absurd). The only bathroom was downstairs which meant every night I would go downstairs, complete my business, walk back up the stairs groggy and shuffling my feet, but then remembered the imaginative serial murdererer hiding behind the railing and I would run up the last 5-6 stairs and haul ass to my bed, where I pulled the covers over my head in hopes that his sharp knifgers couldn't rip threw cheap cotton.

SO, to sum things up, the new plan for success is as such:

1) Form cult where junkfood is banned because ignorance is bliss

B) From here on in junkfood in any place I am in should always be stored in dark stairwells where I will never retrieve it for fear of being captured by the corpse hand in Carrie so Freddie can knife me to death.

Sounds foolproof to me.