BOO!

Not many people know this, but I LOVE to be scared.

I'm not just talking about the scared that comes from watching scary movies or going to a haunted house because although I like both of those things, they seldom do it for me.

I'm actually talking about when someone hides in the dark and jumps out and screams "BOO!" or "ARRG!" when you approach them and it makes you leap into the air, wail out a strange noise that you didn't know you had inside of you, fall down on your butt because your knees weaken, or all of these things combined.

I think my love of it came from my childhood. On many occasions, my sister and I thought that we could be sneaky and try to stay up late without my parents knowing. On these nights, I would slowly tiptoe down the hall to her room in the dark, making sure not to trigger any creaks that may have been lying in the floor beneath me. Once I made it to her room, we were always on the lookout for any sign of a parent approaching so that we could quickly return to our beds and initiate our best impression of what we imagined we looked like when we slept.

If my mother was approaching, all bets were off and we were dead meat. Without even trying, she was as silent as a shadow and she was not even playing games when she came to tell us to return to our beds.

Dad, however, had a different approach. Dad would try his hardest to be as quiet as possible. He too knew just the right places to step on the floor as to not make it creak and the only thing he had going against him in his efforts were his old, popping joints. When it was his turn to tell us to return to our beds, he would creep down the hall, approach Kristi's doorway, and "BOO!!!!!" he would leap into our view, growling and Kristi and I would begin screaming in terror. After each scare, we wanted nothing more then to be back in our safe beds.

However, after 2 or 3 more times of this happening...I realized I liked the adrenalin rush it was giving me! I loved that somehow, when I was scared, I could run 10 times as fast as normal just to get back into my bed. I was addicted!

I soon began anticipating dad's scares and if I heard the slightest popping noise, I always crossed my fingers and hoped it was dad's knees on their way to scare me. This made the anticipation and eventual scare even better when it finally happened! It...was....awesome.

Nowadays, I try my hardest to share this love of being scared with Matt. Since we got married, I have tried many, many approaches to doing this (ie. hiding under the covers and jumping out, hiding in closets and jumping out, hiding behind walls in the dark, etc) but nothing seems to work. He knows its coming if he can't find me and therefore, he over prepares and never gets scared! It SUCKS! I'm running out of ideas and although my friend Amber probably had a good idea when she once had me "get something from her closet" and I opened it to find 2 Mexican guys lunging at me growling and I was so scared that I later found gray hair in my head...I haven't the means of acquiring 2 Mexican guys and I'm not sure Matt would look good prematurely gray.

This mission will continue though and when I get him....I know he's gonna like it!!!