At 11:05 PM Sunday 10/2/2005, Dave Land wrote:
On Oct 2, 2005, at 1:56 PM, Damon Agretto wrote:
Never understood why some people are afraid of spiders...
It's a funny thing. The front of my brain tells me that most of
the spiders I encounter are quite harmless. Something much, much
further back in my brain makes me want to run away, screaming
like a little girl.
Fortunately, despite the fact that the front of my brain is, in
fact, damaged, I am able to trust it enough to capture even
quite large spiders in a cup and transport them outside where
they can do some good.
This even extends to the Black Widows that are so prevalent in
this area. I avoid killing them whenever possible. We had a
really huge Black Widow in the storage shed for Apple's TV
studio back in the early 90s that got a trip in a big plastic
bag to the ivy across the parking lot. She was big in a Steve
Irwin "Gawr, isn't she a beauty?" way. Made the hair on my arms
stand on end just looking at her shining black sharpness.
I was at a dinner party Friday night where one of the guests
(a real girly-girl) was bragging on the fact that she had faced
her fear and killed an extremely large spider in her living
room. I told her that killing something that you outweigh by a
factor of several million to one isn't facing your fear of it.
She wasn't buying it.
Perhaps she was thinking of it more in terms of "killing something
that despite a significant discrepancy in mass is able to kill you" . . .
(Presuming it was or might have been a venomous variety. As you say,
the odds are that any given spider is not, but OTOH the fact that
some are makes some people unwilling to examine a given spider
encountered under uncontrolled circumstances -- IOW, without a
continuous sheet of glass or thick plastic between them and it --
closely enough to determine that.)
--Ronn! :)
"Since I was a small boy, two states have been added to our country
and two words have been added to the pledge of Allegiance... UNDER
GOD. Wouldn't it be a pity if someone said that is a prayer and that
would be eliminated from schools too?"
-- Red Skelton
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