I took myself a half year vacation from blogging simply because, well.... i wasn't inspired. blog topics used to just come to me.... I'd be eating ramen or shampooing my hair and some random thought would pop into my head and i'd just think to myself "wow, that would make a great blog"; and thus a new blog post was born. but lately, i've had no such luck. it got to the point where i was sitting around during boring lectures in music class, thinking of possible blog ideas... and anything that needs to be thought about isn't genuine. thus my blog would be filled with insincere, unnatural, careless words. which i don't stand for. but today my friends, for the first time in nearly 6 months, i found myself once again thinking "wow, that would make a great blog". and this is where our story begins.

I subscribe to like 7 magazines... not by choice, i really only enjoy 1 of them, but the rest were mad cheap and i thought i'd try them out. anyways, i was reading a rather interesting article in Glamour earlier today and I learned that i have a serious problem. Glamour informed me that i am somnorexic. i fit every key characterestic found on the "somnorexia checklist". Basically, I sleep less than 7 hours a night during the week and then crash and sleep for 10+ hours on the weekends. Who knew this had a name? I mean this was a 5 hr. per weekday, 14 hr. per weekendnight sleeper here reading this... I was concerned! Apparently it's a legit and "very serious sleep disorder" that is a "detriment to your health and wreaks havoc in people's lives". Anyways... so I decide to look up more about this so called somnorexia and see if it's as legit as Glamour claims. What did I discover? Not only that somnorexia is an actual medical term commonly used, but I also learned that I have about 17 different "conditions"... and that's only of the conditions I found at one website. And I also learned that they over-categorize and name everything nowadays.... guarantee you have at least 10 problems you weren't aware of.

Before today I thought I just had some social anxiety and depression, but during the day I acquired 14 new clinical conditions. Yes, tonight i'm going to go to sleep knowing that besides being depressed and social anxiety-like, i'm also somnorexic, atelophobic, atychiphobic, mildly cainophobic as well as mildy enosiophobic, half doxophobic, glossiphobic, kakorrhaphiophobic, hydrophobic, katagelophobic, slighty scopophobic, sometimes i think telephonophobic, highly tomophobic and lastly topophobic. Just call me your deranged-with-16-conditions friend. I'm not going to go into detail about what each of those things mean but I can assure you that I am every one of those to some degree... look them up if you're that curious. Some of you may say after all that that I should add hypochondriac to the list...

So I have many problems. This is new to me. I know I have weaknesses and fears and such but they all have names?!?!?! I've determined that they go a bit overboard nowadays in terms of categorizing "conditions" and declaring people "somnorexic" or something of that nature. I mean, some of the things out there are ridiculous. You won't believe some of what I found. If you get angry, even over little things, more than 3 times a week you've got some condition with some long-medical sounding name. If you're often bored it's something else, if you're often indecisive you should "talk to your doctor because this is a serious condition which often needs medicinal help". Perfectionism is a personality disorder, risk taking is viewed as a PSYCHOLOGICAL disorder, workahaulism is viewed to be as bad by some professionals as alcoholism. I mean... this stuff is really out there. What ever happened to just like, depressed, bipolar, anorexic or bulemic? It's like every personality trait out there that isn't "ideal" is given a label and tagged as a medical problem. What seems even sillier is all the phobias that are out there with names. But what's really sad to me is that because they have names, that means people out there do have these things... and extreme versions of them. I mean just imagine....

If you're bibliophobic you're afraid of books, papyrophobic you're afraid of paper. I mean, books and paper are pretty common things in this world. Can you imagine legitimately being terrified of paper? How would you survive anything? Really!!! Think about it; paper's everywhere! There are also those who are graphophobic and terrified of writing and handwriting. That's gotta be pretty difficult too. I really feel bad though for those optophobic folks or people with euphobia. If you're optophobic you're afraid of opening your eyes... what a horrible thing to pick being scared of. Do they walk around with their eyes closed all day? What can they imagine would be there if they open them? What is the saddest one to me though is euphobia... being afraid of getting good news. Doesn't that sound contradictory? It's like... I'm walking around at work today and I'm absolutely terrified that someone may be the bearer of good news. What is there to look forward to in life? Then there's the really abstract phobias like the fear of opinions (allodoxaphobia), fear of ideas (ideophobia), fear of memories (mnemophobia), and fear of thinking (phronemophobia). I don't think I even understand these... how are you afraid of opinions or thinking? Don't we automatically as intelligent homo-sapiens have opinions and thoughts? I'm not even going to touch those four because the more I think about them the more confused I get...

There's of course the generic phobophobia, a fear of phobias themselves. I think the cruelest one though is sesquipedalophobia, the fear of long words. Who on earth would decide to name a phobia of long words something with 2 letters short of 20 letters? That's just mean. By the way, just to let you know.... if you have an intense fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth you have arachibutyrophobia and they claim that a spoonful of peanutbutter twice a day will help cure the problem. On the other hand, if you're a huge math nerd like me... or maybe an art geek too, you may be asymmetriphobic, that's right, having a fear of asymmetrical things. I mean those isoceles triangles are pretty terrifying... I just wish they were all equilateral. And I'd be careful because although your recluse, elderly next-door neighbor was once a teenager, he may be ephebiphobic and have an erratic fear of teenagers. They say that some people are apparently cacophobic and have a fear of ugliness though I'd just call that a tweaked version of being stuck-up where they want to give their conceitedness a more positive name so they say they have some condition.... stuck-up-ness reminds me of middleschool and middleschool reminds me of warheads, that's right the hard candy. If you never got into the Warhead candy craze in middleschool and seemed irrationally terrified by the thought of eating one, don't worry... you probably are just acerophobic and have a fear of sourness. If you ever meet someone who seems to prefer the right side of their body and avoids looking at or touching the left side of anyone elses body please be sensitive to this seemingly irrational behavior, they're just levophobic and have a fear of things to the left side of the body. Although someone with asymmetriphobia wouldn't understand this because the body is symmetrical after all....

A few of these fears reminded me of some scary movies. And I'm not talking about like, phasmophobia, the fear of ghosts or anything like that. I'm talking like... paraskavedekatriaphobia, or the intense fear of Friday the 13th, which consequently also wins the award for being the longest titled phobia. Also, because of a certain movie I can say that for like a 2 week period I once legitametly had a case of eisoptrophobia, a fear of mirrors or of seeing oneself in a mirror and I still am scared by mirrors though I wouldn't go so far as to call it a phobia. I don't need another phobia anyways.... 16's enough.

Bottom line, there's a phobia for everyone. If you're afraid of candles, even when unlit, I'm sure there's a name for that condition. I mean if there's such a thing as pteronophobia, the fear of being tickled by feathers and Francophobia, the fear of French culture, I'm SURE there's a name for being afraid of candles or headphones, or tinfoil or anything you can imagine. So don't be ashamed to admit the clinical conditions you have. Nothing's more ridiculous than being patroiophobic.