Pity the fool

Oy vey, eesh and ugh. There have been moments my life that are so embarrassing they make me wince and recoil and flinch causing me to draw my shoulders up in a posture of self-protection and my butthole slams shut. Then I make a face that looks like someone has just put a steamy turd under my nose and the essence of chagrin comes out of my pores and I shudder in the memory of some never to be forgotten regretful loser ass dumb lame didn't stop long enough to think about it before I did it thing.

I normally think of myself as relatively cool, but we have all had times like these in our past, right? RIGHT?!? SAY RIGHT!! Some verbal dysentery or written vomitosis that sprung forth from our being that didn't waft down from the heavens light as a feather landing delicately on the groud, but rather sprang across the sky like a trebuchet loaded with a shit bucket that splatters over the earth and everyone downwind gets hit.

Tripping up and falling into a puddle of poop when no one is looking is bad enough, but taking a flying leap into a pool of stupid in front of other people sucks. Of which we all recover from, I'm sure, and maybe I'm unique here, but I've done a few things in my life that never fail to make me positively cringe when I think about them. Which I theb have to put effort into stuffing them back into the far away recesses of my warped brain and soothe myself with chocolate. (Of course I "soothe" myself with chocolate if I chip a nail, so , there you go.)

In thinking about what to write today this was the actual topic I came up with since I love to tell a story because hell, why keep all of these humiliations inside my own brain? Why not POST THEM ON THE INTERNET. Then I remembered ~gulp~ a certain poem I wrote a few years ago that I had the ~bleh~ super idea to POST ON THE INTERNET so why not do that again? And the really weird thing? I wrote and posted it exactly 4 years ago to the day. I find that very spooky. And um, it does not make me a dork in anyway. OK?

Anyway, those who read it were cool and gave me props which is saying a lot for them because behold, it is spectacularly bad.

The Thief

I'm a thief, a swindler, a crook and a faker
A dastardly peaceful moment taker
I didn't ask permission to do what I did
I just went and I took it like a spoiled kid
A moment of calm for my stormy soul
To soothe my heart that has been so cold
I forced the sun to touch my face
And lift my spirits without any haste
I sat on a bench that wasn't mine
For it was about gosh darn dang time
To steal this second this minute this hour
And turn around this feeling of sour
I didn't care if the ocean was free
I stole a look anyway,
go ahead, sue me
I sneaked a peak at a lovers embrace
I didn't leave a mark not even a trace
I thought of my friends, the old and the new
And knew it was time to climb out of this stew
And thought to myself, it's gonna be alright
When no one's around
I'll hold myself good and tight
I took a deep breath and let my lips climb
Into a smile I ripped off from the sublime
I know there will be more times to get through
But I robbed something today from my ocean of blue
A feeling of peace that I sometimes lack
So, yea, I took it, and I'm not givin it back!

My god, how did I live with myself? I wrote that after a rough year of being dumped, then hooking up with another guy who was a jerk, thinking I was in love with him but it was all projected left-over feelings for the boyfriend who had broken up with me the year before. And I'd been struggling at a new job the entire year and was pretty darn lost. But jeezus, what possessed me?

I clearly remember feeling so proud and kick-ass and having a moment of positive thinking, which is always good, but damn, girl. Keep that lame shit to yourself. Not everything belongs on the net! That's why there are spiral notebooks because some shit deserves to be nowhere but under your fucking bed. Eesh.

Another smooth move I made can be blamed on youth, but it was humiliating nonetheless. I was in 8th grade and involved in the school play Oklahoma. I tried out for, but didn't get, a part that year which was already a huge embarrassment because I'd made a pretty good reputation for being a little ham a couple years before when I stole the show in Meet Me in St. Louis. But alas, I was stuck behind the scenes doing something crappy like make-up for a bunch of hormone-charged zitty pre-pubescents.

We got through the 2 weekend run of the show and it was finally closing night. The entire cast and crew with parents, etc. were going to have a get-together with the obligatory cookies and punch after the audience had left. I got the brilliant idea to recruit one of my friends to help pull off a big "surprise" for everyone which she readily agreed to because she was a full-time nerd whereas, apparently, I am a situational one.

The whole auditorium was full of kids and adults but things hadn't started rolling yet so the place was surprisingly quiet. My friend and I snuck onto the stage, creeped to downstage dead center, grabbed hands and screamed at the top of our girly high-pitched screeching lungs "LET'S PAAAAAARRRRRRTTTTYYYYYY!!!" Then we jumped off the stage onto the ground where I lost my footing, as did she, on the slippery linoleum floor and we crashed into a heap ripping skirts and gaining fat lips.

As you might have guessed...there was dead silence. Dead. Silence.

Dead.

Silence.

Not a peep in the house. No applause. No hoops. No hollers. No one coming over to see if we were OK. No laughing at the goofy girls. No joining in on some John Hughes movie moment before there was a John Hughes movie but you get what I'm saying. We had 50 pairs of eyes with 50 matching blank faces staring at us.

And after-the-fact I would have rathered someone say, "what the fuck are you 2 retards doing?" But you know what was ever worse? Every single person went back to whomever they were chatting with and completely ignored us like it didn't even happen. It was SO LAME it didn't even register on the something-to-pay-attention-to scale.

I don't even remember what happened after that except I needed to attend to my mouth that had been smashed by a bony elbow and I probably tried to redeem myself by playing it off like I was indeed cool but I was so not. So not. It's a miracle that stunt didn't make it around school, but like I said, it was SO LAME it didn't even matter. Small blessings. Ugh.

There is another totally and completely solidly wholly mortifying thing I did when I was a freshman, a scant year after that last debacle, that involved me and a sloppy patch of very slippery mud and a pair of unfortunate white pants, with me being a stupid smart ass chasing some birds to be "funny" during the all-school lunch break in the middle of the quad in front of, oh, about ONE THOUSAND KIDS. But my butthole is puckered enough for one day. Eesh.

Now, where can I find some chocolate?