Posted by giveawayboy on September 20, 2003 at 13:25:55:
In Reply to: Re: Have you ever posted by quequel on September 20, 2003 at 00:51:28:
: Zoiks! Jeenkies! Think I might have been a bit shaken, being a girl and all. I'm glad he got your car, though. Sounds like God led him to the right place.
What do you mean? I'm definitely NOT a girl and I would be very shaken at coming up to my car only to find a person in the backseat. I think this is one thing about fear that I have finally figured out. One thing that generates fear is encountering something in an unexpected place or context. For instance, if I were to walk out of my bedroom, assuming I was home alone and there standing in my living room quite unexpectedly was a 6 foot tall lime green rabbit, this would really scare the crap out of me. Of course, if someone was to tell me ahead of time that they were going to be coming over dressed like a 6 foot tall lime green rabbit, then I'd be expecting this. There would be some frame of reference with which to process the experience. Without this frame of reference, the experience itself necessarily createds anxiety/fear. I have recently noticed this more. I have sometimes been walking up to my house at night and imagined people stepping out from the bushes for a chat or something and just realized how frightening such an encounter would be, not becuase I'm afraid to meet new people or get to know them, but since there is no precedent to my knowledge of people popping out of the bushes to chat, with the exception of Halloween night, when they usually are just screaming kids trying to cop a scare. It's the fact that there is no precedent for it. I'm not sure whether I'm male or female has anything to do with it. It's the whole experience of a stranger in the backseat, a place you expect to find no one, unless you left them there to begin with. That unexpected encounter has something of a violation in it, whether or not it's the playful rabbit or the tired homeless guy. It's like looking down at your foot while writing emails and seeing the roach that is crawling around next to it......Did you check?