Claustrophobia trumps physicsphobia

You learn something new about yourself every day. Today I learned that I am claustrophobic.

My greatest fear, when it came to my physical science requirement, was that calculations would prove too confusing, that velocities and masses would all form a fuzzy cloud in by head. But today's lab, which required climbing the tower of Rockefeller Chapel and, with the help of a protractor, estimating the distance to the Sears Tower, made the more mathematical aspects of the class seem, well, trivial. By the time my lab partner and I had reached what felt like the 100th set of dark, narrow, spiral staircases, I was in a cold sweat, nearly shaking, my heart racing--what was remarkable was that none of this had anything to do with physics-phobia. When we finally arrived at the top of the Chapel's tower, we got to appreciate the view for a moment, then do the necessary, lab-related calculations. It's amazing how, in what feels (irrationally, of course) like a life-or-death situation, messing around with 2-pi-r, 360 degrees, and assorted variables starts to look ridiculously easy.