I’ve had friends afraid of birds, dogs, spiders, or cheese (the mold factor), but moths is a new one. Most people have irrational fears like these. It’s brave of you to want to face yours!

I carry a lot of odd facts around in my head and your moth avarsion reminded me of one. Moths can’t hear any noise a human voice can make. Their range of hearing is above the highest pitch noise we can make, like a dog whistle. So if you yell at one, it just feels your breath. I think that’s pretty funny.

My fear is of snakes. They have no arms or legs!, I can’t read their body language so I can’t tell what they are about to do. And, they can strike faster than I can react, so that makes me vulnerable and I have a problem with feeling vulnerable. I think there is an ancient instinct in our brain that reacts to the form of a snake, a thin line on the ground.

Those little critters really get to me. I can handle any other kind of creepy crawly (the scientific term), but cockroaches leave me clammy.

I couldn’t even read your entry because that picture freaked me out so much. I hat months too.

Ever looked at one – a dead one, of course – under a microscope? Just to ‘get to know it’? Most flying insects are dark, so they look like anything from flying mouse shit (the wee ones) to flying rabbit shit (the BIG flies). And let’s face it, lots-o-folk have ‘issues’ with shit. Bugs also have too many arms/legs/antennae for us to appreciate them fully as fellow creatures. Too like monsters they are for us. We’re more attuned to things with big, squishy eyes, hard white teeth, hand- & foot-equivalent units at the ends of limbs …

If you could come to identify the homologous parts – they have eyes (compound ones, I admit) and limbs (if you count wings and many-jointed legs) and mouths (if you count suction-cup-oid things) – perhaps you’d feel less disgust and more sympathy. Familiarity breeds contempt, you know.