The family is out again. An Orioles game this time. Right after they left, I heard these creaking noises upstairs from someone walking around. But I didn't panic. My mom and Courtney came back to get jackets and umbrellas because it started pouring just as they turned the corner.
When the power went out earlier this week (I am
so hoping it doesn't go out again today), I was scared. It was totally dark, and I was all alone. A stalker could have figured that out; the van in the driveway was there all the time, and only I ever went in and out of the house. My rational side reassured me that nothing was going to happen, but this little tiny part of me was freaking out. It's something about being in the dark.
Do you remember that old Nickelodeon show,
Are You Afraid of the Dark? I loved that show. The idea was that nothing is there in the dark that isn't there in the light, too. If memory serves me, very few of the stories ever involved something happening in the dark. To my eight- and nine-year-old self, the stories were just scary enough without being
too scary. Only one episode gave me nightmares. It was about this guy who drew a comic book about an insane joker, and the character came to life and starting chasing him. Or something like that. This geeky girl helped him; I don't know why. They got sucked into the comic-book world for a while, and then some other stuff happened, and they finally got rid of the joker by erasing him. The girl used one of those giant "for BIG mistakes" erasers. I don't know what it was about that episode that scared me so much, but I remember waking up, sweating, in the middle of the night after seeing that joker in my dreams.
I used to be afraid of the dark. Really afraid. And then I outgrew it. Then, when we moved to Japan, my mom got me hooked on my night-light again (she thought my room was too dark and I'd fall trying to climb off the top bunk). I eventually weaned myself from it. But that night I lost power, I was afraid of the dark once again. I had two flashlights. When I finally had to climb into bed, I considered leaving one flashlight on, but I turned it off in the end. I didn't sleep well that night.
I saved part of the IM convo I had last night (er, this morning) with Rajni, who showed me how to remove the SMG ad (not without a trouble or two!) Of course, the computer started acting up and had to be put down, so I lost it. (Stupid fussy Internet-connected box.) We were talking about fanfiction; I was reading Harry Potter, she *NSync. I mentioned that I never real real-person based fics. I read one once, and it was really stupid, something about celebrities on
The Real World. My philosophy is that if you ever actually met the person from an RPB fic, you'd expect them to be like their fic alter-ego, and for them to do something you read in a fic. That would just be disappointing. I'm sure there's fabulous RPB fics out there (the equivalent of my beloved Draco Trilogy). I just guess it's not my thing. And there'd be odd RPB-slash, too, which is just too much to handle. As my mom always says, to each his (or her) own.
