Thursday, November 18, 2004
Me Against The Animal Kingdom
I had a nightmare last night that my school, in all of its avaricious glory, had sold the rights to the campus lawn to a farm meaning that when one went to class, they had to walk by a menagerie of horses, cows, goats, sheep and chickens.
You mightn't think this is what nightmares are made of but I have, since childhood, had a profound dislike/bizarre fear of farms and the animals found there. Not all of the animals, I do quite like ducks and had hoped to get a pet duck named Gatsby but, much in the fate of many of my dreams, the idea was shot down by the parental units. And pigs are rather cute from a distance. Specifically the kind of distance where they are painted on a mug.
But horses? Cows? Goats? Donkeys? All leave me with a monumentally icky feeling and the very sight of them unsettles me.
I think that, like many of my various neuroses, this comes from lingering psychological trauma from childhood, specifically the town "farm".
I grew up in a suburban area that is known for shops and cul-de-sacs and a rather big lake that people are obsessed with. The area isn't rural at all but, for reasons unbeknownst to me, the powers that be created a farm for a tourist attraction of sorts, or a place to have birthday parties. No, it wasn't a good idea at all, but the community leaders aren't terribly bright.
The farm boasted random barns scattered across the land, big weeping willows and a heinously ugly general store that, due to wind and weather, looked purple. There was the usual assortment of animals--horses, cows, ducks, chickens, goats, sheep, pigs, and a seemingly unending plethora of donkeys, I'm assuming there was a discount of some sort on donkeys that year--and all in all, it was lame. Lame than lame even.
Epic levels of lameness aside, parents attempted to instill a love for animals in their children by having myriad birthday parties at the farm, where you got to walk around, ride on a horse, feed chickens (read: throw food on the ground and run away before the vicious chickens attacked you) and have lunch. At one such birthday party, a cow moseyed over to me and "Moo"-ed loudly in my ear. I have not been the same since.
After that, the farm seemed even more creepy than it had before and I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach whenever I drove by.
Next to the entrance to the farm was a 7-11 and, when traveling with my father, we often stopped there to get gas and, if my tantrums were effective, a Slurpy and a Hostess Snoball. One morning on the way to work, my father was getting gas and I was sitting in the car listening to talk radio (really, is it any wonder that I am the way I am?), and I looked out the window and was greeted with two donkeys looking in the window at me.
To say that I "screamed" doesn't do justice to the sound I made, a shriek of terror found so rarely in nature.
My father, thinking I had been stabbed by someone sitting with me in the back seat (or not, you know, he was old enough not to believe in urban legends) looked in the car, saw the surce of my fear and shooed the donkeys away, where they moseyed up to the 7-11 entrance and waited to terrify the people who walked out.
Once we pulled out of the parking lot, we had one of those serious talks where my father attempts to bring himself down to the level of a child which, when the child is prone to flights of fancy and easily distracted, is never easy. He told me that donkeys are as afraid of me as I was of them--which is why, I pointed out, they were so quick to run when I screamed. Oh, except how they weren't--and that he hadn't heard many stories about little girls being mauled by donkeys--the qualifying "many" implied to me that he had heard some stories about girls being attacked by crazy donkeys--and, finally, that I was in the car and no donkey was strong enough to break down the door to come get me. He had a point there.
My dislike of farms continued unabated for years. It's weird, because I do enjoy the zoo. But something about farm animals just gives me the willies. There was also the highly unfortunate class trip to the Catskill Game Farm where I was majorly squicked by the abundance of chickens roaming freely and the llamas that looked highly evil. They claim that their unique array of animal attractions would be interesting, but all it did was give me new animals to be disturbed by.
I suppose I'll save my distaste for the rodent population for another time, lest PETA get all up in my grill.
And that concludes the story of my fear of farms. I know, I'm a headcase.
Is he doing a Jedi mind-melding trick? Or maybe he thinks he can talk to the animals, like Dr. Doolittle. At any rate, weird.*
*It would be far too easy to make a joke about befriending someone on his mental level, so I decided to show some restraint.
Oh, Karl. We all feel that way about the obese heathens who dare wear clothes above a size zero, but we don't say it out loud!
And besides, dude, you're responsible for Kimora Lee Simmons. Let he among us who has not created a tacky shopaholic monster cast the first stone.
Mallory at 11/18/2004 12:42:00 PM
1 Comments
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at 4:39 PM
said... It may upset you greatly to know that at the zoo nearest my town, there is a cross-bred animal called a Zonkey (donkey/zebra)... THE MUTANTS ARE COMING!!
(though zonkeys cannot reproduce)
-kayte