My unquiet mind

I worry all the time. I come from a long line of worriers, so it makes perfect sense, but lately the amount of worrying I do has started to worry me.
My grandmother is the absolute authority on worrying about things you have little to no control over. I remember an incident, when I was about 8 years old, she and I were driving home from having our hair cut, and it was foggy outside. She said to me, "Do ever think you'll just drop off into nothing, especially when it's foggy outside like this?"
I was confused; what did she mean, drop off into nothing? How is that possible? So, I asked her, "How could that happen?"
She said, "People disappear all the time, and no one can explain it. Maybe they just dropped off into nothing."
Well, needless to say, the worry torch was sufficiently passed along after that conversation, and I think I'm doing an excellent job of keeping it lit.
In high school, I would worry about anything and everything, including, but not limited to: My friends, my boyfriends, my appearance, what I would do that weekend, whether or not I could get into a good college and what I would do with the rest of my life, what I would be doing when I was 30 (which seemed massively far away), what would happen when my parents died, would I have enough money to take care of myself...you get the picture.
That stuff kept me awake frequently and still does, but now is when it's really started to bug me.
I have mild insomnia anyway, so when my mind won't just shut up, I lie awake and twist and turn 5,000 scenarios around in my head and still invariably get about 5 hours of sleep a night.
Granted, since I've moved to Philadelphia, my worries are a little more profound, but the funny thing is, before I moved, I wasn't nearly as plagued with doubt and stress as I've been since I moved.
I think I had the added benefit of having to do so many things in such a small amount of time in order to wrap up my life in Mississippi that, quite frankly, I didn't have time to worry.
Perhaps I should take up kickboxing or interpretive dance, because when I have more than a little down time, I find myself really torn up about things like will the Democrats find a good candidate in 2008, will friends that I worry about (JC) be okay, how do I get that spaghetti stain out of my carpet, will my children be delinquents, or worse, ugly, which prefaces that other HUGE question, will I ever get married and have children and will I ever find a job that monkeys wouldn't be more appropriate having?
I'll leave you with another gem from my grandmother. As long as I live, I will check the backseat of my car every time I get inside of it at night. I don't care if it's parked in Macon, Mississippi, or Center City Philadelphia. Every time I left my grandparents' house with my sister driving, and later, me, she would either tell us or yell out of the front door, "Check the backseat and make sure there's no one waiting to get you. Somebody could be waiting to hit you in the head and kidnap you."
And people wonder why I'm neurotic.