Nothing makes you feel quite so foolish as cracking a raw egg that you thought was hard-boiled. Unless you crack it against your desk. At work. With emphasis. In front of coworkers and a stunned student who was, up to that moment, hoping to gain advice from you in the field of academic writing.
There’s no going back. You have, almost literally, egg on your face.
Later, when I posted this event on the Facebook, a friend commented that my life was sort of like a sitcom. I laughed, and then went over a few events that supported this idea. I came to the conclusion that most people surely have some measure of sitcom-ness to their lives. It’s just that I am more public with my goofs – blog, Facebook, crying in a pub.
But last week I put on the wrong pair of jeans at 6:30 a.m. and went to work with a gaping hole in the butt region. I am a teacher, so there are large periods of time when I stand in front of a huge group of college kids. All of whom have cameras attached to their phones and would rather take pictures of board work and presentations than write down notes.
I spent the twenty minutes before class standing at the wall in my office, pretending to write on an imaginary board while my coworkers analyzed whether the hole in my jeans was visible. They concluded that it would be visible only if someone knew what they were looking for.
I think I escaped with my dignity intact.
A few days later my cat and I were engaging in combat when I inadvertently smacked my head off of the radiator. Of course I started bleeding profusely and bled all over my writing kufi. That morning, as I stood in the bathroom applying Neosporin to a head wound in my part, I realized it.
I do have a sitcom life.
In order to support this realization, I went back through recent journal notes and Facebook posts. Aside from the above mentioned, in the last few weeks I have been stalked by an overzealous security guard, been in a pub with a gang of drunken opera singers, stabbed myself with a fork, thought I had ebola, and accidentally hooked myself to a stranger on the tram with my shoulder bag. And this is just recently. Added to a lifetime of sitcom experiences (hitting on a nun, taking a pantless walk around the doctor’s office after a colonoscopy) the evidence was overwhelming.
All I need now is a hipster doofus stopping by and mooching things, or maybe a couple of astrophysicists could start bringing around Thai food. Maybe I should start implementing “True story” or some other catch phrase. As this all became clear, I did wonder this:
What the heck was next?
That question was answered yesterday when, in the middle of (another) class, my belt snapped in half like dry fishing line. Before you make the obvious fat joke, this particular wardrobe malfunction was probably not due to any extra strain put upon the accessory. A better deduction would be the quality of the belt. Who’d have thought that a belt from the Dollar Store (paradoxically costing $6:45), would hold up so poorly when bending to pick up an eraser?
And as I chalked this occurrence up to my sitcom life, I remembered getting stuck in this belt while trying it on at that Dollar Store two months ago.
True story.
Maybe I should call NBC.
