Fred Chases me Around the Garden with a Caterpillar
December 13th 2007 21:04
Everyone has phobias. I personally cannot stand maggots, snails, worms, caterpillars, grubs – in a nutshell, larvae in any shape or form. In fact, anything that has no bones inside it (such as jellyfish) gives me the willies. I just hate the way larvae can undulate their bodies – it looks so ugly and creepy. The furrier the grubs/caterpillars are, the creepier they are to me, especially moth larvae. Ugh! I think (apart from maggots) they are the ugliest of the larvae family. And I can’t stand the ones Sir David Attenborough calls loopers. You know, the caterpillars that have no legs in the middle so when they move, they have to wait for the back half of their body to catch up with the front before they can re-commence moving.
My friend Fred, in contrast, loves caterpillars and cats. He says that’s why caterpillars have ‘cat’ as part of their name - it’s because they’re nice and furry like felis catus. Oh, please! But it’s funny that he mentions that as the Cantonese word for caterpillar is derived from the Cantonese word for cat.
So one day Fred decided to subject me to a test. We were hanging out in the garden of the block of units I live in and I noticed a tiny lime green caterpillar on Fred’s shirt. I told him and Fred let it crawl onto his finger. Fred then decided to move his finger closer to me so I could have a closer look. Well, given my phobia, there was no way I was going to let this caterpillar get any closer so I started running away and Fred started chasing me around the garden with the caterpillar on his finger, all the time, trying to convince me to stop being such a scaredy cat, that I was a million times larger than it so why should I be terrified of something so small, and besides, it was a cute lime green one and would I please stop running? But like all phobias, I couldn’t listen to reason, even though I knew in my heart of hearts he was right.
My friend Fred, in contrast, loves caterpillars and cats. He says that’s why caterpillars have ‘cat’ as part of their name - it’s because they’re nice and furry like felis catus. Oh, please! But it’s funny that he mentions that as the Cantonese word for caterpillar is derived from the Cantonese word for cat.
So one day Fred decided to subject me to a test. We were hanging out in the garden of the block of units I live in and I noticed a tiny lime green caterpillar on Fred’s shirt. I told him and Fred let it crawl onto his finger. Fred then decided to move his finger closer to me so I could have a closer look. Well, given my phobia, there was no way I was going to let this caterpillar get any closer so I started running away and Fred started chasing me around the garden with the caterpillar on his finger, all the time, trying to convince me to stop being such a scaredy cat, that I was a million times larger than it so why should I be terrified of something so small, and besides, it was a cute lime green one and would I please stop running? But like all phobias, I couldn’t listen to reason, even though I knew in my heart of hearts he was right.
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