Arachnophobia Pyromania (And Why I Don't Keep Matches Around)

A man in Seattle burned down his house to get rid of a spider. Burned down his house. Totally normal. He didn't overreact at all.

The Huffington Post reported, "The man told firefighters that he saw a spider in his laundry room and decided the best way to take care of it was with a lighter and a can of spray paint." His homemade blow torch set the wall on fire and then the fire spread quickly from there. And as ridiculous as this sounds, this is not the first time a fire has been caused by arachnophobia.
So take this as a warning, if you see a terrifying spider in your house, avoid temptation to want to burn the evil out.
I kind of get it though. Last summer I had a horror movie worthy experience in my apartment when a bat died on my dining room light fixture. The bat had unknowingly been co-habitating with me for an indeterminate amount of time prior to its death. One night I came home and found hundreds of flies all over my ceiling and dining room.

Not an actual picture from my house, but this is so you can get the chilling visual.

At first, I thought maybe it was a summer bug infestation from something like a used wine glass left out, but then realized that a room covered in flies is in no way normal. Upon investigation, I found the rotting, dead bat on the light and commenced the freak out.

At that moment, with the hundreds of flies and a decomposing mammal, I really could understand just burning my place to the ground....but I didn't.
Though, to this day, if I see just one fly, I pretty much began screaming in a manic fit of terror.
And to protect myself from being a Huffington Post headline, I make sure I don't keep matches around.
Try to stay calm people.

Do You Want Fries With That?

You know the kind of day where you're just like, "stick a fork in me I'm done?" Nothing is going well and everyone around you is like nails on a chalkboard.
I was having one of these days earlier this week. I am tense as it is because I'm waiting to hear back

from a major tv casting I had a call back for last week. And on top of that and all other daily normal stresses, anything that could go wrong was. So it seemed completely reasonable to want to scream when I was in Dunkin Donuts and they got my so-important-for-survival coffee order wrong. But I held it together. Though at Whole Foods, when they were out of the turkey sandwich on cranberry nut bread AND some Lululemon woman was allowing her toddler to whine at the top of its lungs, the ability to control myself seemed more challenging. And as I stood in the dairy section wanting to cry that the cheese I felt would save this day and me from total destruction was ten ridiculous dollars, I found myself thinking that I wanted to grab the egg cartons and just start smashing them in Whole Food's aisles. But I didn't. (Though I wonder how many eggs I could smash before I got escorted out?) Instead of going crazy, I spent the ten dollars on the cheese, in addition to my other grocery purchases totaling a terrifying $95, and headed home, broke and in despair, to eat the hunk of cheese and question all my life choices.

Then I saw online about this woman at a Florida McDonald's and thought how we are all this woman inside, we just haven't reached our boiling point yet. I think I'm close though. To me, she is almost some sort of bizarre hero. I mean, she willingly stripped to her thong in public. I don't even feel brave enough usually to do that in front of the seemingly judgmental gaze of my cat. She has apparent super strength as she destroys the McDonald's pushing registers off the counter and knocking over fridges. And no one dares to stop her! The employees standing there seem to just be gazing in awe. And the employees whose voices you hear on the video are laughing, practically cheering her on like the rock star she is. The best part is, like it is for so many of us, soft serve ice cream is her cryptonite. While on her path of destruction, she goes in for that, putting her face right under the dispenser-living the dream as the stream of soft serve glides out directly into her mouth. This seems to calm her down and she then makes herself a nice cone to enjoy as she finishes her rant. Amazing.

This McFreakOut video also reminds me of the brilliant Julia Louis-Dreyfus in her obvioiusly staged but hilarious cafe freak out last year.
While I actually believe I would never reach this point (at least in public), I get it.