Clowns are so not my favorite

I just know everyone in the world is going to think I am completely crazy, because yes, I have yet another thing I'm afraid of to confess. It's clowns! I hadn't thought about clowns for a while, all right, maybe a day or two, until my friend Laurie told me she was going to the circus on Saturday, and I felt a shudder. I admit it, I do not like clowns. Or mimes. And I'm not real crazy about magicians either. Though I'm not scared of them, I just find them kind of annoying.

I heard the above Ingrid Michaelson song, "The Way I Am," months ago in an Old Navy sweater commercial and liked it, and put it on m iPod. I really liked it, until I saw the scary video which features, you got it - clowns. How they could ruin a perfectly good song with clowns I do not know.

I don't know where the clown phobia started, but I do remember being upset at the circus, and throwing up once at the Ice Capades because the smell of a woman's perfume who was sitting near us. Hey, cut me some slack, I was like 5-years-old.

Throughout my childhood I would tense up whenever clowns were around, they were so not happy to me! I know I'm not alone in my coulrophobia. My friend Laura says she suffers from it too and I know there are many more of us out there.

I Googled "clowns are scary," and 390,000 pages came up. I found everything from videos of scary clowns to one Web site that had an "I hate clowns" store that has mugs, T-shirts, hats and more. I especially loved the shirts that said, "Can't sleep - clowns will eat me." They even have an "I hate mimes" T-shirt as well. See? I am SO not alone!

My kids, no longer small children, don't seem particularly fond of clowns either, but this is probably my fault, as is their disdain for the "Wizard of Oz," because yes, that scares me too. Hello?! Have you seen that witch?! I don't know what scares me more, the witch or those freaking flying monkeys. They were pretty equally terrifying for an impressionable small child, who grew up to be an apparently very impressionable woman. Wow, I really am kind of a mess, aren't I?

The good news is the older I get, and the older my children get, the less clown-centric activities I have to deal with. I don't attend many children's birthday parties, I don't frequent the circus or grand openings of car dealerships (for some reason they think this will bring in customers, I so beg to differ) and living in a small town I don't run into many street performers (i.e. - mimes!). So my life is pretty much clown-free.

If I could just convince musicians to not put clowns in their videos, things would pretty much be perfect.