Its Sunday and in a few hours i'll be waking up from my comfortable slumber for work.

My first week came and gone and in a blink, the second week of my 9 months has started.

It feels sooooooo surreal and everything is way out of my comfort zone.

But I do love the work I do though-its all so new and interesting to me - that is perhaps the one good consolation. ;)

I was woken up by thunder. Massive crazy loud thunder.
And try as I might, I can't go back to sleep.
Cos the subsequent successive thunders and lightning still keep me up and make me shiver in fright and my heart pound.
Not the screaming kinda fright but the cuddle in my blanket, close my eyes and imagination going on overdrive (hint: that there are monsters or ghosts lurking behind every rumble and flash of light) type of fear.

Yes. I am 22 with illogical fears at the back of her mind.

While we are on the topic of fears, let me just say that I have a long long list of them.
And I give credit to those memes and tags of "What are you afraid of?" on blogs and fb for making me self reflect on these things.

Cos I realised that without them I wouldn't have particularly thought much about what makes me scream in fright (until the point where i actually do scream in fright).

So, yes, my list of 1o1 top 10Fears.

Other than thunder, its the dark, dark, dark night. I am terrified of the dark. I have been and always will be. As I said before, I have an over active imagination (a result of too much horror reading during my teen and tween years, ie., Christopher Pike, Fear Street-ish stuff) AND
also no thanks to my dad who will purposely switch off the light and imitate a wolfs howl just to scare us. I actually thought I conquered it when I was in my late teens but only had it slapped back at my face when I was walkin down this lonely road in Reading on the way back to my hall.

Fear of snakes. I shudder just even picturing them in my mind. How can anyone keep snakes as pets!?? So thats why I never will participate in things like Fear Factor or Amazing Race- what if they dare me to hold one or WORSE, eat insects?????????

Oh, did I mention I have acrophobia as well? I have an extreme and sometimes irrational fear of heights. This even happens sometimes when I am on an extremely tilted or angled escalator- like the one in Genting in the themepark. I will clutch the handrail or the sidebar and focus on the clothing of someone in front of me. I sometimes even have vertigo and feel the world spinnning in my head. So no roller coasters, no flying pads (Thorpe Park was once and never again), no cable cars ( I tried it in Shenzhen and Genting and cried all the way up looking white as sheet) but yes to suspension bridges cos they aren't too bad once you focus on the trees and my brothers dont MOVE the bridge.

And of course, there is the all too prevalent fear of being alone-which is very different from the fear of doing things alone (see below).

Lastly (cos my plan of blogging to make me fall asleep has worked), I USED [do note the past tense] to fear doing things alone. Fortunately not anymore as I become more assured of myself and am actually loving the space that it entails ie., my freedom and independence. But of course Irony is never far from my life for I am what you would call a walking bundle of self contradictions. Due to the ritual I have of telling myself that its ok to be alone, it has contributed to what is now known as Serene's "self independence".
Correction : EXCESSIVE INDEPENDENCE.

Which some people and myself find bad to a certain extent, cos I now extremely dislike having my actions controlled or dictated by a third party.

Which of course is a topic for another day because I will have a long list of justifications for it just because I can. :)

Btw, to make it clear, dislikes and fears are 2 totally different things.