All right.
My parents are retired now.
They were in the medical professions.
My mom was a psychiatrist.
Actually, I'm very proud of her.
She was one of the country's foremost psychiatrists
back in the '80s.
And back in the '80s--
I keep saying that--
we didn't have the internet.
And what we had was big mail days.
So we would have mail of just books,
medicine-- medical books, that kind of thing.
We never actually had literature in the home
unless my younger sister and I got it from the library.
So it's actually stunning that I became an English professor.
But what we did have is all--
so many books on science, and nature, and my mom's
medical books.
And one of the books that we got was
something-- it was like a phone book, it came once a year.
And it was the compendium of all that year's diagnosed phobias,
which is the phobia list.
And so that, to my sister and I--
we were 10, nine years old-- that
was like Christmas rummaging through the Sears catalog.
There would be things like fear of bald people,
fear of the pope, fear of peanut butter
sticking to the roof of your mouth, that kind of thing.
Then years later I realized like, wow, I
was a jerk as a kid because these are all actual people.
These are actual people who sought help for their fears.
No matter how much a 10-year-old found that funny,
in hindsight now I realize, again, these
are very real people here.
So they stopped making the hard copy.
It's available now online.
Those of you who are students, don't
look at this tonight, which means you're
going to look at it tonight.
You will be lost for two hours of like alphabetical compendium
of all the world's phobias.
And you'll just look up and it'll
be midnight all of a sudden.
Anyway, so that's an exercise that I do for those of you who
are writing students and here's--
I have you-- I have my students go to the phobia list.
And instead of making fun of it-- ha, ha, ha--
there's some X-rated ones in there--
is I actually asked them to choose a phobia
and to write from the point of view of someone
who has that phobia and to show empathy.
You could be funny but also to show
that this is in fact a three-dimensional person who
just happens to, I don't know, have a fear of worms,
or axolotls, or something like that.
So this is a poem from the phobia list--
a little bit of a different spin about it-- about the phobia
not from the point of view of someone who has the phobia.
This is called "Hippopotomonstr osesquippedaliophobia,"
or the fear of long words.
"On the first day of classes, I secretly
begged my students-- please, do not be afraid of me.
I know my last name on your semester
schedule is chopped off or probably misspelled or both.
I can't help it.
I know the panic of too many consonants
rubbed up against each other, no room for vowels
to fan some air into the room of a box marked instructor.
You want something to really startle you?
Try tapping the ball of roots of a potted tomato plant in--
into your cupped hand one spring only to find
a small, black toad, who kicks and blinks his cold eye
at you, the sun, or a gnat.
Be afraid of the X-rays for your teeth or lung.
Pray for no dark spots.
You might have-- and I always have to pause on this.
This is the longest word in the OED.
You may have pneumonoultramic roscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis,
or cold lung.
Be afraid of money spiders tiptoeing across your face
while you sleep on a sweet, big, fat couch.
But don't be afraid of me, my last name, or what language
I speak, or what accent dulls itself on my molars.
I promise I will tell jokes.
I will help you see the gleam of the beak of mohawked cockatiel.
I will lecture on luminescent sweeps
of ocean full of tiny dinoflagellates oozing
green light when disturbed.
I promise dark gatherings of toad fish and comical
shrimp just when you think you are all alone in this class
hoping to stay somehow afloat."