Not so irrational fears

I've become a big fan of podcasts and especially like listening to them while walking the dog. One of the recent episodes of This American Life has especially stuck with me in a not so good way. In it, a woman describes an incident where a cockroach burrowed into her ear canal. YEEEA...aargh..ich..ach...hhchch. *shudder*

Believe it or not, with the exception of the horrendous creature affectionately known down south as the palmetto bug and the hissing cockroaches that were housed in a disturbingly full fishtank in my college bio lab, I really didn't know what regular house cockroaches looked like. Then I started working at DSS and learned very quickly how to identify all manner of insects and rodents. Yeah, it was quite an education. It turns out regular cockroaches are much smaller than I expected. So, the picture of one burrowing into someone's ear canal is quite real in my mind, as a result. Great.

Thanks to my job, I also finally know what silverfish are. Turns out, they're not really fish. My conception of them never developed beyond five years old, where I imagined them to be tiny air breathing fish that left little tunnels behind them from whatever they ate through. Kind of like termites. Instead, they're little scuttering beasts... I would rather have kept my old picture of them.
But nothing tops the horror of the house centipede.

This... this... is the stuff of nightmares.