Death and the Roller Coaster

Last Sunday I had a panic attack. It was caused by a roller coaster, I know, me in an Attraction Park? You ask, well yes I went and as we entered the park everything was fine, some common friends of the Argentine and me, invited us and we tagged along. I had thought it will be a total change of pace and will be a break in the routine. So I said yes, knowing full well that I do not enjoy masses of people. The park was not very crowded and the weather was good (good – warm yet not overtly sunny), but as soon as the crew chose the first roller coaster I froze. I mean it, I froze. I saw the loops up in the air and the seats – one of those roller coasters where ur feet dangle – and I thought O.M.G. I am going to die. Seriously, that is what I thought. I tried to get out of it, and say I will wait for you here, but they would not hear a word of it. The Argentinean, told me to do it once, and if it was horrible I could pout the rest of the day. Of course my attack has just started, we made the line, and its was long, felt like we spent 45 minutes waiting, and everyone encouraged me and all, but I was just trying to breath in and breath out and the more I thought about, the more the fear latched on to me, and towards the end I even felt short of breath. It was like I was sure we were going to die, or become paralyzed, or have a terrible accident, or the ride would stop midway and we would spend 2 hours dangling from the thing in wait for rescue … the scenarios in my head where countless and all fatidic. Finally we get there, we are about to get on the little seats and I thought this is my chance I will just keep walking and no one will notice. But I realized I had promised I would try it once, and the Argentine was very sweet and told me that nothing was going to happen. Against all my survival instincts I sat down and strapped myself, and then I closed my eyes …
The ride starts with this extremely strong push forward (to generate the g’s needed to push the cars up and then around and around) and that was not scary, then we turned and went up, up, up and then I opened my eyes and yes my feet were dangling, but nothing felt wrong, it actually felt – can you keep a secret? – Good. The ride took us over 4 or 5 loops, around, up, down and sideways and you can see the park bellow you and it is so fast you can not really stop and think much. All of sudden it comes to an end, and we were down again, and I realized I had not lost limb or life. I – can you keep another secret? – had even enjoyed it.
From there we went on to 4 more roller coasters and I enjoyed them immensely, I even laughed specially in one that was inside, so you could not really tell what was coming next. All in all I had a great day in the park – I know some of you would not think I would enjoy it, but I did – it was very clean and the only bad part was the pizza we had in the beginning, yuck. Such a total waste of carbs, anyway, we made up by working on oatmeal cookies later that nite.