may the fourth be with you

yesterday a cantaloupe made me cry.

I knifed it open, got one look at its nasty insides, ran away and spontaneously cried my face off behind my pink pillow. thank god I don't live alone, I would never have been able to walk back into the kitchen. maybe I should explain: I have this phobia of holes and/or unnatural (or natural, just disgusting looking) voids in food stuffs, wood, stone... whatever, I haven't looked too deep into it (pun intended) since it makes my skin crawl with invisible piss ants. in one of my bravest moments, though, I looked it up online and it appears that the name of this phobia is trypophobia (and yes, it is a real phobia, I can (and will not) testify to that).

I've only ever met one other person who suffers from this phobia, and she grew up on the Faroe Islands as well; it may well be that it stems from here - back in the day people ate lots of whale flesh, lots more than they do now, anyway (damn mercury), and when holes started to appear in the flesh, it was rotting and could make you sick or make you die if you ate it. so maybe it's a survival gene passed on to me from my island dwelling ancestors, who were deathly afraid of eating decaying whale. a gene which now paralyzes me in fragile, embarrassing moments that no one else seems to understand.

another explanation may be that once, when I was about 5, we'd baked my all time favorite cocoa cake. it was summer time, we were at the beach, and the cake was resting on top of the oven with a dishcloth over it. after beaching and sanding and sunning, I ran into the kitchen to eat a much anticipated and well earned piece of cocoa cake. I cut it open (my mom might have done this, but I don't remember it that way), stared in disbelief and started crying - it was crawling with ants! every air hole, and even the dishcloth, was alive with ants collecting sweet stuff for their precious winged queen. you could not tell which was crumb and which was ant; everything in that casserole was hustling and bustling about in a sickening way. it was a crippling experience, if not for me, then for the cocoa cake recipe; I didn't make or eat that cake ever since, apart from about three or four months ago when my mom decided trying it out again, almost 20 years later, and it was not a success. I didn't think about the ants, though, it just didn't taste good anymore.