When Steven Spielberg’s kick-awesome movie Jurassic Park came out in 1993, I was five. This meant, as it did for every other good movie that came out around this era, that my parents and my brother got to go see it, and I got to stay home with a babysitter. Then I got to listen when my family came home and talked about how spectacular it was. But when I asked if I could see it, I got the standard, “Noooo, it’s too scary for you!”

Even though I protested loudly that it was not too scary for me because I was definitelygrown-up enough to handle it, some inside part of me stored away those words “IT’S TOO SCARY FOR YOU,” and totally believed them. So, over the next several years, as more of my friends saw the movie and loved it, I dutifully refused any opportunity to see it, because my parents said it was just. too. scary.

So by the time my parents decided that I was finally ready, the idea of watching Jurassic Park had become such a huge ordeal that my eight-year-old brain vacillated between excitement and sheer TERROR at the mere mention of its name. But I had also grown incredibly curious: I had to see this movie, with its scary dinosaurs and its detached human limbs, because I had to know what it was like! It was time!

So I saw it. And it scared the bejeebies out of me. And I LOVED IT. Jurassic Park instantly became my favorite movie. I loved the story, the characters, the dinosaurs (the velociraptors were my favorites, probably because the scared me the most; I used to stalk around the living room with my teeth sticking out and my hands curled like velociraptor claws.)–but most of all, I think I just liked the fact that I finally got to see it.

But then a curious thing happened: more than a year after I actually saw the movie, I started having Jurassic Park dreams. And by dreams, I actually mean nightmares. Every other night I was running through kitchens being chased by raptors, or I was trapped in a T-Rex paddock, or I was in a car driving madly away from some baddie dino running behind us. Suddenly, all the fun of being scared by the movie was gone. It wasn’t fun or adventurous anymore. It was just terrifying.

That was almost ten years ago… and I still have Jurassic Park dreams on a regular basis. I had one just two nights ago, which is what prompted me to write this post. Unlike most movies that I loved as much as I did that one, I have only seen Jurassic Park once. And I probably will never watch it again. Why? Because I honestly think it would scare me more now than it did when I was eight. Weird. I guess my parents were right: It was too scary.

Let me introduce you to my friend Natalie. She is one month and one day older than me, and we have known each other our entire lives. As children we played American Girls Dolls and “olden-days” together. She has always been incredibly sweet, fun, and stubborn. (Not to mention a bit loony: I vividly remember one day when we were sitting in her car waiting for her mom, who had just got out for some reason. We were parked on a steep hill, and Nata kept eyeing the emergency break saying, “Erin, what would you do if I just released that break right now? I don’t think I can stop myself from doing it!” … all the while sounding very distressed at herself for even thinking such thoughts.)

One of Nata’s many endearing qualities is the way she anthropomorphizes things. I think that every inanimate object she has come into contact with her entire life has some kind of name. Her cell phone is Stella, her car is Chloe, and her iPod is Lola, to name but a few.

Two nights ago, Natalie spent the night at my house. As the hour grew later, we became increasingly reduced to giggle fits on the couch about everything and nothing. (I’m sad to report that many chocolate-covered peppermint sticks sacrificed their lives for these festivities.) In a moment of particular exuberance, Natalie propelled her cell phone, which she had just been holding, across the room, where it landed in a rocking chair. But at the instant the phone left her hand, a look of terror at the horrible act she had just committed spread over Natalie’s face, and as the phone sailed through the air she suddenly screamed, “STELLA, DON’T JUMP!!”

That same night, Nata asked me how I think of things to write in my blog. I told her that I just try to find the interesting stories in everyday life. I didn’t mention that it also helps to have crazy friends.

Judging by the TV shows I watch semi-regularly, I should be a kitchen goddess. One of my father’s hobbies is cooking, and he enjoys leaving the Food Network on in our living room some evenings. In this manner, I have been exposed to all manner of cooking shows. Our favorite show, by far, is Good Eats, hosted by Alton Brown. Alton Brown is far more than a chef. He is a veritable culinary scientist; instead of just telling you how long to cook the thing, he explains the molecular bonding responsible for the way it cooks. Pretty sweet, eh?

So, as I said, I should be relatively proficient in the ways of cooking. The sad truth, however, is that every person who has lived at least ten years on the planet knows more about cooking than I do. Because, the real extent of my cooking ability is: Mac and cheese. I’m not even joking. I’ve tried making other things, (There was the infamous “slippery pepper noodles” fiasco, among other things) but mac and cheese is my old standby… the only thing I can really be trusted to cook.

… Except for that one time, of course. I am referring to an incident that occurred within the last six months, on some innocent afternoon when I was cooking myself up some macaroni for lunch. I think where I really went wrong was talking to Elijah on the phone while I did this. Because, although I can cook mac ‘n cheese like nobody’s business, I apparently cannot multitask. So after I had finished both my phone conversation and my cooking, I dished up some helpings both for myself and mom.

It took approximately two bites into the macaroni to realize that something was horribly, dreadfully wrong. The cheesy sauce just seemed incredibly… thick. Too rich to bear, almost. “Did you add salt to this?” Mom asked. Now that she mentioned it, I noticed the overpowering saltiness too. What had I done wrong??

That’s when I remembered. Instead of taking that stick of butter and cutting it in half, so that I would have a quarter cup of butter (the mac ‘n cheese box recommends a quarter cup, but even that is excessive), while I was talking on the phone I had put the ENTIRE stick of butter in: a whole half cup! As soon as I realized this, the macaroni ceased to taste simply horrible. Now it was atrocious. I couldn’t force down another bite, and I just grimaced down at the slimy, fat-slathered noodles. After seeing Mom eyeing her macaroni in a similar fashion, we reluctantly threw the whole pot-full away.

Luckily, I have not had the same difficulty with mac ‘n cheese since. I think it is clear, however, that fast food restaurants were invented for people like me.

So yesterday afternoon I was innocently sitting in my computer chair, leaning forward a bit and surfing the web. And my shirt must have ridden up a little bit, exposing my lower back, because suddenly I felt this sensation like something tickling my skin. So I craned my head around to look, and LO and BEHOLD. All I saw was BIG BLACK, HAIRY-LEGGEDNESS. A GIANT SPIDER was sitting on MY BACK.

Alright. Let me pause here a moment to explain something to my dear readers. I have this nice little condition, which, according to dictionary.com is:

a·rach·no·pho·bi·a n. An abnormal fear of spiders.

This means that spiders and I, uh, we do not play well together. Notice the word “abnormal” in the definition above. We are not talking the kind of spider-fear that every little girl has when she squeals “Ewww!” at big bugs; no, we are talking the kind of irrational fear that makes me feel like I have been punched in the stomach if I accidently stumble on the picture of an arachnid. It’s really truly that bad. Don’t tell me I’m exaggerating, because I’m not. If any of you are also arachnophobic, you know what I’m talking about. (Quick story: One time I when I was probably about twelve, I was at one of my best friends’ house looking at her (illustrated) copy of the latest Guinness’ Book of World Records. I was happily browsing the pages until I stumbled on the entry for “world’s largest spider,” a color photograph of which took up half the page. I was so startled that I actually SCREAMED OUT LOUD, dropped the book on the floor, and stood there panting for about a minute. This is when my friend started believing me about my arachnophobia. )

So anyway, fast forward to yesterday afternoon. There I was, locking eyes with this monstrosity for what felt like ten minutes but was actually probably 0.5 seconds, because before the thought “I should probably sit still till I can find something to squish it with” could pass through my synapses, I had leaped halfway across the room and screamed, flinging the beast off of myself. When I realized that this meant he was probably on THE FLOOR or on MY BED in or HIDING IN SOME CORNER waiting to come sit on my face in the middle of the night, I proceeded to hop around my room yelping in an admirable imitation of someone who has just stepped on hot coals.

Panicked, I ran out into the living room to find Mom. (Another quick story: Mom is the designated spider killer in our house. Interestingly, Dad has a case of arachnophobia as bad as if not worse than mine; this makes me wonder if a phobia can be hereditary.) I quickly related the whole of what had happened to Mom while trying not to hyperventilate. So, armed with a flashlight, she marched into my room to look for this sinister creature. After a few minutes, she was trying to console me by saying that the spider wanted to avoid me as much as I wanted to avoid it, but the thought that it was hiding somewhere in my room was not especially consoling.

Just when it seemed there was no chance of finding it, Mom noticed a large black bug skittering across the floor towards my door. Only, IT WAS AN ANT. GROAN. I realized that in my haste to get as far away from my attacker as possible, I had not actually taken the time to confirm that it was a spider; it could easily have been an ant. Now, granted, the fact that there was a giant ANT crawling on me in my room is not that comforting, but it is certainly better than the alternative.

So there’s your “laugh at Erin” story for the day.

Today I bit the bullet and bought a pro Flickr account. This was partially inspired by the awesome time I had taking photographs at a get-together for Brian and Melanie on Sunday. You can see those photos at my photostream. And if you happen to be one of the people of whom I put a picture up, let me know if you’d rather I take it down. Except for Kelly, because the picture of Kelly is way too awesome.

This is one of my all-time favorite shots. These flowers were sitting on a table, and Brian happened to notice that the sunlight had thrown an awesome spotlight on them. So I seized the opportunity.

So, in case you haven’t heard, my brother Brian is getting married. And, because I love him so much, and because he is my only-est brother, I made him a website. Or maybe it was because he and Melanie kidnapped me and tied me to a computer chair until I finally gave in and churned out the site for them. (This last part may or may not be true.)

Either way, the site is up now, and ripe for your viewing pleasure! But please don’t take the website as an invitation to the event. Especially if I don’t know you.

ALSO! And this is important: I realize that many of you may be coming to this site from a link on Brian and Melanie’s website. Which means that you probably know me, and you may or may not be embarrassed to find yourself looking at my personal site. Well, DON’T be! I have purposefully not posted anything on this site that I’m trying to hide from anyone I know. Yes, even YOU. So feel free to look around, and please leave me comments! I’d love to know who’s been here.

Alright, that’s all.

Sometimes when I’m sitting in a public place waiting for something, like food or gas or my turn for something, I’ll pull out my cell phone and randomly scroll through the menus, pretending like I’m text-messaging somebody important or dealing with some pressing cell phone business.

This helps me avoid that uncomfortable “being watched” feeling. ‘Cause at least if people are watching me, they can clearly see that I have important business to attend to.

I realized with a jolt this afternoon that the books I’d checked out from the University library were due… yesterday! And then when Mom informed me that the fees are a dollar a day per book… and I had six books… I had a slight panic attack.

Six bucks for one little teensy weensy mistake? This SUCKS, I thought to myself.

But nevertheless, I spent the evening getting what I needed for my paper rewrite out of the books; I carefully transcribed passages and removed little post-it notes and wrote down bibliography information.

One of the books was a collection of works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and since the thesis of my paper revolved around his “Divinity School Address,” my checked-out copy was thoroughly laced with post-it flags pointing out interesting portions. I found an online copy of the speech, however, and devoted more than an hour to highlighting all those same passages in Microsoft Word; I even noted where the pages broke in the copy I had, for citation purposes. So around eleven o’clock tonight, after I finally accomplished all this, I went down to the library, all prepared to pay my six bucks and be done with it. I walk up to the counter, and explain my situation to the friendly clerk.

“Actually,” she corrects me, “We bill you through the mail, not at the desk. And the fee is only fifty cents per book per day. And we don’t send out a notice until each book has reached two dollars. So you can get off scot free!”

So I feel a little silly for coming in at eleven o’clock, but I’m still thinking, “Great!”

“Oh,” she goes on, “so should I go ahead and check these back out for you?”

“Huh?”

“You can check them back out. You can only renew them once, but if you bring them to the desk the second time you can check them out again.”

At this point I’m feeling like pretty much a total failure. I can’t even handle library books the right way! Not only did I bring them back late in the first place, but I spent large amounts of time transcribing notes that I just could have kept if I had run down to the library and RE-CHECKED OUT MY BOOKS.

So I sheepishly picked out a couple of the more useful books to check out again and shuffled out of the library like a whipped puppy. But oh well. Mostly I’m just glad I didn’t have to pay six bucks.

… but I’m really glad Reese Witherspoon won. She was absolutely charming as June Carter. In fact, forget social commentary/activism! I think Walk the Line shoulda just won best picture. Even though it wasn’t nominated. Because it was a singularly awesome movie.

I’ve been finding it hard to find anything to say here in the last week, so in an attempt to break that writer’s block, here is a list of things I have been thinking about/doing recently: (Lists always make me feel better.)

In Life:

• Taking pictures. I’ve taken custody of my parents’ Canon Powershot, and have been taking lots of pictures just about every day. Although only a small fraction of said pictures have made their way onto Flickr… most of the ones worth looking at have.
• Mom and I finished up the reorganization of my room… basically. I do have some pictures of that to post, including of my computer workspace setup, but I can’t post all my good content at one time! So I’ll save those for a day or two.
• I forgot to mention it, but I really enjoyed watching the winter olympics in Turin. They were wild! That reminds me… you know Shaun White, the US gold medalist snowboarder with the mop of red hair, a.k.a. “The Flying Tomato”? Well, my friend Noah has given me a new nickname: “The Sitting Tomato.” Ever since he had this epiphany he’s also called me “The Moping Tomato,” “The Whining Tomato,” “The Drawing Tomato,” etc. He’s pretty proud of himself. *sigh*
• I’ve had the plague for the last half week. I knew it would come around eventually… luckily it hasn’t hit me as hard as it did several of my friends. I didn’t even get a fever, just sore throat, runny nose, standard icky stuff. Today I’ve felt pretty okay, but my nose has been itching like crazy the whole day. I can never really be sure, at any given moment, that I’m not going to suddenly explode in sneezes. (It HAS happened.)

In Technology:

• Ma.gnolia, the new kid on the block of social bookmarking, launched recently. I haven’t used it to any great extent yet, but I plan to try out it’s link-rolling capability in my sidebar sometime soon.
• Blogmad also recently launched (in beta). I had signed up with them before they launched, so I’m able to try out the beta… and I have to say, I’m impressed with how many page hits I’ve gotten from them. However… the ‘credits’ system that they use is a little confusing. I don’t really know how to use it.
• I just have to point out this awesome wallpaper that I snagged from Jackieocean. It is Lost-a-licious.
• I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to the whole mac vs. windows debate recently, because I am thinking of getting a laptop sometime this year. I have a lot to say about it, but I’m going to save that for a bit later. Actually, you’ll be hearing a great deal more about it… I have a bit of something up my sleeve… *suspense*

For now, I shall leave you with the picture of the small but friendly donkey who lives on my bookcase:

For extra credit, spot the unintentional easter egg in this picture. Lol… if you click on the picture, the Flickr note will spill the beans. See if you can find it first.