1. Lists 2. Indexes 3. Catalogues 4. Tables 5. Enumerations

I like lists. One might have noticed that many of my blog entries are written in the form of lists. Lists are wonderful, because you can sift through the information without having to deal with personality. It has been said that my love of lists is a symptom of the fact that I am merely an automaton who's life goal is to understand emotion in order to truly become "human." In response to that I say:

01010111.01101000.01100101.01101110.00100000.01001001.00100000.
01100111.01100001.01101001.01101110.00100000.01110011.01100101.
01101110.01110100.01101001.01100101.01101110.01100011.01100101.
00100000.01001001.00100000.01110111.01101001.01101100.01101100.
00100000.01100100.01100101.01110011.01110100.01110010.01101111.
01111001.00100000.01111001.01101111.01110101.00100000.01100001.
01101100.01101100.00100001.

So anyway, one of my favorite browsing sites when I'm bored or should be working or both: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists

Today I'm looking at lists of phobias. It's for a story I'm working on. As I go through the list I have to wonder about some of these. It would seem to me that there are cases where the exclusion of a particular phobia would be reason to doubt a person's sanity. Let me put it another way.

Here are some proper phobias:

Arachibutyrophobia- fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth.
Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliaphobia- fear of long words.
Nomophobia - fear of being out of mobile phone contact.

Irrational. Debilitating. If we are being simultaneously honest and callous: really kind of stupid. That is what we, as Americans raised to believe that our uneducated opinions are somehow valid, have come to expect from phobias. It gets a little iffier* when you have phobias like

Algophobia — fear of pain.

July 22, 1973 - Have tested subject by exposing to multiple stimuli including electrical current, angry bees, combination of sandpaper and lemon juice, etc. In all cases, response has been the same - "Please stop hurting me! what is wrong with you people!" We have concluded that the subject appears to be afraid of pain. Fascinating.

Agraphobia - fear of sexual abuse

I can only imagine this one was thought up by a newly graduated psychiatrist who spent most of his college career studying "brewski's" and calling other guys "bra."

Tomophobia - fear or anxiety of surgeries/surgical operations

Also known as fear of being sliced open by a complete stranger. It's an offshoot of another phobia that was very common in the middle ages, particularly among soldiers. For more information, see Braveheart.

Radiophobia - fear of radioactivity or X-rays.

Again, not so much a phobia as a survival skill. Presumably, Madame Curie was being totally rational when she soaked herself in radiation till it killed her.

One final note:

Phobophobia — fear of having a phobia.

Not sure if this one fits into either of the above categories. However, we have been told time and time again** that this one is actually admirable to have, so I think it's inclusion in a list of phobias is somewhat unfair.

(Discovered in the course of writing this post

I like to think of this page as the shortest essay ever written on the subject of modern society.)


*Spellcheck agrees that this is in fact a word. Though it does not seem to think that "spellcheck" is.

** Both Franklin Roosevelt and Professor Lupin say so.