i was waiting for the bus this morning, on my way to work, and one of the busses that passed me had a banner ad on the side for NBC’s program “Fear Factor,” which is now showing in syndication on UPN, apparently. the ad featured a man, wearing goggles, whose head was covered in tarantulas.

i started thinking about what i fear. i don’t actually fear being covered in tarantulas, for example. i think i’d be okay with it, if it happened. tarantulas are all right. i’ve had them walk on me before — they’re sort of tickly, and they’re soft to pet, with very fine fur. in fact, if i were covered in tarantulas, i think my biggest fear would be that one of them would tickle me and i’d reflexively slap or scratch the spot, and hurt the spiders.

i don’t fear flying, and i don’t worry every time i step on a plane now that it might be taken by terrorists and crashed into a building — if nothing else, i’m sure that my heavy-ass laptop would make a hell of a bludgeon to smash over someone’s head. i’m not afraid of heights, crowds, or wide open spaces. i just clean up the glass if i break a mirror. i’ve walked through the authorized-access-only track beds of subway tunnels without authorization. i’m not scared of falling off a boat and drowning, because i’m an excellent swimmer. i’m not afraid that if i bleach my hair it’s all going to fall out, or that anti-perspirant will eventually give me Alzheimer’s. i’m not bothered by bees that fly near me unless they look like they’re trying to drown in my drink. i don’t worry that elevators are going to drop me forty stories and turn me into toothpaste. i walk around at night, alone, in cities where i do or do not speak the local language and don’t really know the area at all, without thinking anything of it.

i’m not particularly afraid of dying. i have a couple of specific, practical concerns, mostly — i worry that i might die in my apartment and no one will come take care of my cats for a couple of days, and i worry that if i die, i will have somehow forgotten to get adequate insurance to take care of my outstanding debts — the house, the car, credit cards, etc. (this latter is despite the fact that i’m fairly heavily insured, for a single, childless twentysomething. i still worry that i forgot something, like i somehow have a half-million-dollar yacht that i forgot to pay for and then misplaced.) that’s mostly about it for the death front, though. i mean, i don’t look forward to it, but i just don’t care all that much. i’d prefer to die in a quick fashion — i prefer the toothpaste-by-elevator option over, say, leukemia, for example — but i have to go sometime, so i don’t see the sense in wasting time getting all freaky about it.

so, what — if i were a contestant on “Fear Factor” — would NBC have to taunt me with? this is all i could come up with:

i am scared of being found lacking in social situations. i hate being wrong, and i expend a lot of effort to avoid it wherever possible — before taking part in an online argument, i will often spend an hour researching evidence for my contention. usually i end up killing the post anyways, though, because i worry that somehow, i missed something obvious, and will look like an idiot as a consequence.

a few months ago, i was at a bar with a friend — who, i think it is safe to say, is socially very confident, at least from my external point of view; which is to say that if he has any relevant fears, he hasn’t confessed them to me — and the bartender was chatting with us. the bartender asked if i’d seen the show “The Office,” which i misheard or misinterpreted as asking if i’d seen “Office Space.” i nodded enthusiastically and then launched into a tangent about our reenactment of the “Death of a Fax Machine” scene at work, which had been not too long before this. he stared at me for a minute and then said, “No, not ‘Office Space,’ ‘The Office.’ The British comedy.”

i was absolutely horrified. it was such a glaring blunder — if i had just shut up, no one would have had to know that i had misunderstood, until i heard what he was going to say enough to figure out he was talking about “The Office” instead. the final irony was that this was shortly after i’d returned from the UK in january — where i had bought both series one and two of “The Office” on DVD. i managed to smile and nod and “oh! i’m a dumbass. — yeah, i’ve seen ‘The Office,'” but i felt so humiliated that i was upset the entire rest of the time. i haven’t been back to that bar since. of course it’s completely unlikely that, should that same bartender happen to be working, he’d come up to me, ask me what i’d like to have, and then go “Hey, I know you! You’re that dumbass that can’t tell ‘Office Space’ apart from ‘The Office,'” but that doesn’t really matter.

i once had a panic attack at Tommy Nevin’s in evanston, when i was there with a bunch of friends. the place filled up with people — my paranoid feeling was that they were all the beautiful people who had been the popular kids in high school — and it freaked me out so badly i had to go hide in the ladies room for something like twenty minutes until i had managed to regain some semblance of composure. my friend steph helped talk me down, but it took at least a year before i went back to nevin’s.

fortunately, that’s the only time that’s ever happened. generally, if i’m not enjoying myself, i just leave. i don’t know why i was especially broken that day. the truly odd bit is that, if i was never the head cheerleader or a football hero, i was also never friendless, picked on, or really left out. middle school, i didn’t have a whole lot of friends, but my parents were divorcing and everything was all fucked up anyways. but junior high and high school were great.

in reality, i appear to be afraid of some sort of ideal of the hollywood high school popular kids. i’m afraid of turning out to be anthony michael hall in sixteen candles, even though i’m really molly ringwald in pretty in pink. (well, without the romantic ending — yet — just with the good, goofy friends, odd clothing habits, and reasonable self-assurance).

(of course, i could be making up that last paragraph — i haven’t seen either of those movies in a while — but, hey, it sounded good. maybe i’m actually annie potts in pretty in pink, but without the record store. man, i want the record store.)

so i’m not afraid that i’ll ever end up alone, because i have friends, and i expect to continue to have friends. i’m not afraid either that i’ll never fall in love, because i have. in that regard, i’m more afraid of running into someone i’d really rather not up on the north side sometime. though, the less said on that the better, because i don’t even like to think about that, much less spill my guts to the internet. people say that you get over things once enough time goes by, but i have come to think that that’s a polite lie people tell when they can’t think of anything that’s both true and consoling. at best, i think, you learn to not think about the things that still hurt even after ten years have gone by.

so, i suppose that i am fairly ill-suited to be on “Fear Factor.” i haven’t got any nice, clean-but-gross physical neuroses to be exploited for the squicked-out entertainment of the viewing audience. put me in a box with scorpions, i’ll try and stay away from them, but otherwise i’ll mostly just be bored because you probably won’t give me anything to read. put me in a building on fire, i’ll fall to the floor and figure out how to crawl out, and then i’ll talk like a two-pack-a-day-for-forty-years smoker for a week. make me pilot and land a small aircraft after the real pilot parachutes out, and i’ll try to remember everything i’ve ever seen in movies — i believe you pull out or down on the stick to keep the nose of the craft up.

just don’t put me alone and unprepared in a bar full of trendy people.