A Bone to Pick with Bones

One of my favorite memories of my parents from my childhood was the elaborate Halloween parties that they used to throw. My mother was costume and facepaint artist extraordinaire not to mention really handy when it came to making props! - She would decorate the ENTIRE house in whatever theme she had decided for that year, and once a year for one month, my house was not my house but an old vampire's castle or an ancient Egyptian tomb - one year everything looked like it came straight out of an old Bugs Bunny cartoon. It was magical, and has had me enthusiastic about Halloween ever since. 

However, one Halloween encounter scared the pants off of me and it's only been very recently that I've discovered I no longer fear it (or them, I guess) ... but let me begin with a little bit of what I was like as a kid ....

My parents love to refer to the fact that as a young child, I had a hard time accepting or liking anything that wasn't 'logical' ... some prominent examples :

Mermaids? Half-fish and half-person? No way. Scary as hell.

Humpty-Dumpty? Talking egg that plummets to its' doom? Straight out of a Wes Craven film.

Talking toothbrush? Adults are messed up.

All these things and more scared the living daylights out of me. Needless to say, a few years later, I grew out of it and grew open to fantasies like wizards and unicorns and dragons, and I ate it all up. Myths and folktales have been an obsession of mine ever since. So, I ended up being quite an imaginative (if not somewhat morbid from all the uncensored Grimm's fairytalkes) kid.

One Halloween while my mom was decorating, I had been sent to my room early that night, and missed a lot of what my mom was putting up around the house. Early that morning, I got up out of bed to go use the restroom, opened my door, and came face to face with ---

In the wee hours of the morning. No warning. No other Halloween decorations around.
His name is Bucky, by the way. My mom's very own medical skeleton.

I didn't scream, but I refused to walk past it. I scrambled back into bed as quick as I could and tried to go back to sleep.

I don't know what it was about that night, but bones.... that's right - bones.... have had the pleasure of giving me shivers every time I look at them. 

One night for a Girl Scouts', we spent the night in the museum.... in the bones room (didn't sleep)

 ..... as a museum guard, I had to walk past the fossils exhibit in the dark (I generally ran)

.... and visiting the Discovery center, I couldn't bring myself to walk through a giant mouth of skeletal teeth (missed that exhibit completely) 

.... Bones struck fear into me.

.... but I've come to the conclusion that it was a weird chemical imbalance in my brain, because now that I am on a medication for my anxiety disorder, I'm not afraid of bones or skeletons at all. 

In fact, I rather enjoy them. Have sort of a morbid curiosity with them, actually.
One of my weirder hobbies is watching videos of dental procedures on YouTube.com