My two-year-old daughter was playing in the living room so I couldn’t spay it with insecticide like I would normally do. So I had to resort to my last option of trying to cunningly splat it dead with my slipper, which was the only available weapon at the time.
Armed with my flip-flop of death, I fearfully yet cunningly hunted down my prey. The roach was resting on an obscure part of the upholstered sofa near the wall so I knew my aim had to be precise. It wasn’t.
The frisky insect quickly dodged my initial strike. And as if sensing my fear, it taunted by racing directly towards me. I screamed in horror as I franticly tried to get out of its path. It seemed to have helped though, because the roach then skewed a line underneath the side table where I continued to hunt it down. As I moved the table nearly breaking the lamp that was on top of it, the roach quickly flew across the living room towards the other furniture, just barely missing me.
My mother in law, together with my wife’s brother, and not to mention my little daughter’s nanny who were all there, watched in amusement as I shrieked like a little girl while dodging and persistently stalking the roach like a mad man. I couldn’t rest until I saw it dead with my own two eyes. After hunting it down for a few more minutes, death was eventually served by a swift single left slipper.
In my opinion, the bravest person in the world won’t be the man who can perform a high wire balancing act 100 feet in the air with no safety net. Nor will it be the person who can jump a ramp on a speeding motor cycle going through a blazing ring of fire after clearing a length of ten passenger busses. NO. The person I consider to have the courage of staring fear straight in the eye would be the individual who is totally unafraid of Periplaneta Americana, the insect more popularly known as the common house cockroach.
Sure, a lot of people are afraid of these hideously disgusting crawling creatures. And I suppose despising them is all but normal. But I think I take my dread for these insects to a whole new mindless level of fear. I not only hate cockroaches, but I also am seriously and utterly terrified of them. I know I risk losing a lot of “man points” just by admitting this, but here’s how much I loathe this insect:
- I consider my self to be a fairly brave outdoor type of person. I swim and scuba dive in deep open waters totally brushing aside the possibility of sharks and other man eating marine creatures. But if scientists one day discover a new species of underwater cockroach, I would surrender my c-card and would never be seen in the ocean ever again.
- I am a hard sleeper. I set an alarm backed up by 3 separate reminders at different intervals on my mobile phone with the volume cranked way up high just so that I eventually figure out that I need to wake up. An atomic bomb wouldn’t be able to disturb me if I am really in deep sleep. But I swear, no matter how tired or sleepy I am, I would always know, ALWAYS know, if a cockroach is crawling on any part of my body. In rare occasions when dreadful moments like these do happen, even in my deepest slumber my remaining senses would still trigger a fail-safe alarm when a cockroach has somehow crept in my bed and crawled on my skin. I would spring out of bed heading towards the light switch, automatically by pass the half-awake phase and I would grab the nearest broom or slipper. I would not go back to sleep if I am not sure I’ve either killed the roach, or know that it is no longer in the room.
- Some people consider “The Sixth Sense”, “The Ring” or “The Exorcist” as their scariest movie ever. Mine is still “Joe’s Apartment”. It is by far the most disgustingly scary film ever made. I would rather see dead people than see live cockroaches any day.
Phobias are clinically defined as irrational fears. It’s not enough to just to be afraid of something for it to be escalated as a phobia; the primary prerequisite is that it also has to be irrational. And I do realize that my own fear is unreasonable to some extent, after all I am a thousand times bigger than the cockroach, and I can easily kill it more ways than one. But that doesn’t purge the fact from my head that they are still the grossest creatures that can possibly invade a home.
What’s worse is that there is absolutely no easy cure for this. There is absolutely nothing true anybody can tell me that would make me like, appreciate or even understand cockroaches. It’s a fear that there is just no getting over. I used to do lectures on ecological principles in the environmental organization I was with and I always made it clear that though all life forms are important, roaches are definitely exceptions. I wouldn't mind if they become extinct. I don’t know what’s the integral role they play in the delicate ecological balance, and quite honestly I don’t care.
I got a quick call from my best friend Jon just this morning telling me that Rey Kabigting, my dive instructor friend and former officemate is on TV (if you've seen mobile phone posters and billboards with a picture of a bald headed diver, that's Rey). As it turned out, the lucky bastard was in a show on channel seven where he was assisting this hot chick face and eventually conquer her fear of water by going scuba diving. I was shaking my head. That’s just unfair. Why couldn’t I be afraid of water, or beautiful far away exotic places, or even delicious fattening food? Why of all the phobias out there I had to get one that involves a creepy crawling creature that will eventually still be around even after a thermonuclear explosion.
I told Jon in jest that maybe I could call up the show and pretend to have an irrational fear of lovely young horny college girls. I'd ask if perhaps they could help me conquer that fear. He replied, topping off what I just told him. I’m afraid I just couldn’t say it here.