Birds, Fear, and some other Rambling.

Many of you may have noticed my strange paranoia. It is not, as you may assume, unfounded, made up, or pretend. I am genuinely scared of birds. It started way back in the day (no, I'm not going to rap Fresh Prince,) when my best friend bought two pet parakeets. I obligingly went over to her house to examine said birds, and was at first enchanted. The charm soon wore off. Having few friends, I spent a good amount of time at my friend's house, and I had always been fascinated by her variety of pets. However, soon after the purchase of the two parakeets, they became quite tame. Tame enough to be handled, grab hold of your fingers with their little claws, and fly around the house, dive-bombing people's heads. Thus began my fear. The more the little things flew at my head, or used their little claws to hang on to my clothes, my paranoia grew. After my friend sold the birds, my fear subsided slightly, as most things do when they're not being agitated. Unfortunately, throughout high school, I had a few bird-related incidences, like neighbors having a fake owl whose eyes glowed in the dark, and having my acquaintance's bird watch me everywhere I went, that agitated my fear once again, and it has grown into full-blown paranoia.

Over the last few weeks, birds have been smashing into my window with alarming regularity. I tried a number of methods to make them stop, paper cutouts attached to the window, letting the window get dirty so it wouldn't reflect so well, and so on. I finally appeared to find a solution that deterred the birds -- taping CDs to my window shiny side out. However, this at first did not work, but then the birds decided that they had to get to me through a different tactic. Today, I awoke this morning to my mom yelling. That is an unusual method for my mom to take when something is bothersome, since she is very diplomatic. When I climbed out of bed to inquire, she told me that the same bird had smashed into her window multiple times. Not only was it inflicting this atrocity on our house, it was grabbing ahold of the screen with its little bird feet, actually poking its claws into our house. I suppressed a scream of horror at the thought of a bird in my house. I spent a good part of an hour trying to devise ways to make it leave, but none were successful. I finally mowed the lawn out of frustration, and that drove it away for a while. But I'm quite sure it will be back in the morning.

Now, I do realize that a paranoia this trivial (to you) can be annoying, even frustrating. But I swear it is not made up. I may shudder or possibly shriek at the sight of a bird within too close a range or without a wall or window between it and I, but there are people whose fears are far less rational than mine. For instance, about 80-90% of the population shudders and/or shrieks at the sight of a spider. However, spiders can be either smashed or caught in a safe manner and released in the great outdoors with no problem. I see no sensible reason to be afraid of spiders -- you see no sensible reason to be afraid of birds. We have come to a stalemate. So, I shall close with a quote of unknown sources. "We have nothing to fear but fear itself," and birds.