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Life is a smorgasbord of experiences, weird, fun, wild, scary or what have you. What we experience molds us, and sometimes, it molds us into a simpering sissy girl of a person, scarring us for life and giving us phobias that can never be shaken. Whether they be politically correct or not (let‘s be fair - they‘re not), here are the four things that freak me right the hell out.

4. Mentally Handicapped People

When Superman Returns came out, I didn’t have high hopes. I didn’t know that Brandon Routh was a mouthwatering morsel of a man and I could look at his ass in tights all damn day. So I went to see it with a boy at ten a.m. on a Tuesday, when there wouldn’t be a crowd to worry about and I could play with my cell phone if I got too bored.

Because of the time, there was no one in the theater when we sat down, and it stayed that way through most of the previews. But right at the last minute, a woman and her ten to twelve year old daughter came in and sat directly behind me and my date, which is completely rude. What if I want to put my feet up on the chair in front of me, or whisper to my date, or stealth text? Now I have two people behind me in a friggin’ stadium seating theater. Great.

Five minutes into the film, however, it gets worse: the little girl begins kicking the back of my seat. In Amandaland, there is nothing worse than screwing with my enjoyment of a movie, even if I didn’t want to be there in the first place. So this little girl, who had to sit right behind me, is kicking, kicking, kicking, and I am seething, seething, seething. Finally, I shoot her mother a dirty look, and she stops the girl.

For about five minutes.

In case you’re wondering, there is a reason I don’t have kids. My patience with children is not great, but my patience with idiot parents is even less. I give the mom another dirty look, which works about the same as the last one, and the third time this brat starts kicking the back of my chair I turn around with what I imagine to be my Large Marge\scary face on and growl, very loudly, ‘Knock it off!’ at the kid. It is at this point, snarling into her face, that I figure out she is retarded. She starts to cry, I figure I’m going to hell, and they finally move to the other side of the theater.

Since that day, I have obsessed over why a parent in their right mind would sit their mentally handicapped kid right behind the only other people in a massive and empty theater - the woman had to know she would have problems handling her kid. Why would she subject your run of the mill average Jane - read bitch - to her kid? Didn’t she know that I would be scarred for life knowing I may have scarred her kid for life? Whatever that woman was thinking, I learned my lesson - avoid retards at all costs.

3. Clowns

There is no valid reason why I saw Poltergeist at the tender age of five, but I did. My parents, who typically know better, were even present. When the movie was over, my older sister (senior to me by six years, she was already aware of what a nuisance I was and war had been declared) informed me, at the movie’s end, that there was a clown under my bed. Now, I was no fan of my big sister either (there would be fist-fights, blackmail and a lot of mean pranks in our future), but I knew, instinctually, that she was just trying to prove that I was a baby and scare me, simply because she could. I was already stubborn as hell at five, and I puffed up my chest and refuted her wild claim. She dared me to go look. She double dared me. Then she threw down the mother of all dares, the infamous triple dog dare (I had also already seen A Christmas Story). I narrowed my eyes and accepted her challenge.

What I didn’t know was that, just after the clown under the bed scene, when she had announced that she was going to the bathroom and fled the living room (in what I wrongly assumed was the bitch move of an eleven year old in terror), she instead snuck off to her room and retrieved last Christmas’s present from a deranged aunt - a shoe caddy in the shape of a clown. She hid the thing under my pink frilly bed, ran to the bathroom, flushed, and came back to bide her time to the end of the movie and her triumph. And what a triumph it was; I screamed and screamed, and from that day forward, refused to have anything to do with clowns.

2. The Elderly

Like a lot of my stories, this one also takes place in a movie theater (I go to the movies a lot. What?). At the end of a particularly long film, I bum rushed the bathrooms, only to discover that there was a line. After ten long minutes of me doing the pee-pee dance, a stall finally opens up - the handicapped stall. It’s big, it’s spacious, that little metal bar is an excellent place to perch my handbag, and best of all, it’s mine. I damn near sprint in, drop trow - and the elderly woman in line behind me starts banging on the stall door, screaming that I’m not handicapped and shouldn’t park my ass there.

There were several things I could have done; I could have informed the old biddy that I don’t need a sticker to take a piss, I could have faked being deaf, whatever. What I did do was yank up my jeans and run like hell out of the theater. For whatever reason, granny put the fear of god (and handicapped stalls) in me, and I held it until I got home and could pee in the sanctity of my own bathroom.

1. Hillbillies

It is a point of pride for me that I resemble my mother. She’s little and adorable, and if you cut my hair short and dyed it white, I’d be a little replica of her. I’m proud of my family ties - mostly.

In every family, there is a branch that people wish they could hack right off with a big, sharp ax, like George Washington on a cherry tree. My family’s particular curse is hillbillies. Though I have many disturbingly southern gothic tales of my family, I chose the tale of Baby funereal to share.

My cousin, who shall remain nameless,  is a few months off from me in age. She delivered her seventh child stillborn at the age of twenty three. The family was called to the funeral, and arrive we did. Some of us showed up in black, as is tradition. But since this particular cousin belongs to the scarier side of the family, we were greatly in the minority. My first indication that something was desperately wrong with this funeral was the gigantic party tent in the cemetery (over the graves of strangers, I might add). There was also bluegrass music blasting off a boom box, a buffet table, and the assortment of relatives in their fourth of July finest - think flip-flops, wife beaters and muumuus that would have looked appropriate on a freaking clown. There was a receiving line set up next to the casket (the tiniest casket I have ever seen) and my cousin’s mother set up station next to the casket as the photographer.

The photographer.

I’ve seen The Others. I know all about this spooky practice of photographing the dead. Only I thought it died out a long freaking time ago, with hoop skirts and child labor. But my freaking hillbilly relatives lined up to have their picture taken with Baby - so named because my lazy cousin didn’t even bother to name her stillborn child - in different freaking poses.

Some chose sleeping baby. Some chose praying baby. Some even chose Baby in a different outfit - and the wardrobe change was completed right there, in the middle of the cemetery. I was terrified that I was a blood relative to these freaks of nature, and high-tailed it out of the backwoods end of my home town, only to show up at family reunions when I absolutely had to, when there was no excuse for getting out. Because this side of my family scares the hell out of me; I think about their hillbilly as a recessive trait, like Huntington’s disease, that will flair up and drag me down to the murky depths of hillbilly-dom. It is the thing I fear most, that one day I’ll wake up and think, ‘you know what? I’ve got a hankering for home-grilled possum’ (a traditional Easter dish) or will bear a child with a cousin of mine (same cousin as above. Know what happens when two first cousins get together and make another cousin? We call her the bonus cousin, and sadly, she is more famous than me. She‘s been on Springer).