Bears, and bears and bears, Oh my!

When word reached the newsroom last week that one or more bears had been sighted in the area, my reaction was not "Hmm, I guess they've come to eat some garbage." as most other people seem to have calmly deduced. Instead, I thought "Rats! They've found me at last."

I have had a paranoid fear of bears ever since I saw the movie The Edge when I was about 10. Obviously my fear is not completely irrational. I'm pretty sure that in a bear vs. Sarah throwdown, I'M the one getting my head swiped off and eaten.
However, having grown up in a relatively urban area, where the scariest animals I was likely to come across were really big ducks, I probably would have been better off worrying about the *eighty-four thousand tourists driving the wrong way up my street, than an errant bear.

Instead, I've spent valuable time worrying about things like birds flying into my face while I'm on a roller coaster (if it happened to Fabio, it could happen to me), getting trapped under ice (I have rarely, if ever been forced to skate around on icebergs), or, thanks to a tv show that shall remain nameless, dying alone in my apartment and having my cat eat my face.

The thing is, most of the bad, scary, or life-threatening things that have happened to me, I could never have dreamed up to be afraid of in the first place.

So I guess I can take comfort in the idea that as long as I continue to be afraid of bears, they probably won't show up on my porch with a Sarah-sized cake pan.

Plus I don't actually have a cat.

*An approximation based on gross exaggeration