Could You Please Pass The Awkward?

The other day I was telling a friend about another friend who cleans his hair solely with baby shampoo, and mistakenly said he swore not by washing with baby shampoo but by washing with baby hair.

Last night I ordered a veggie sub.  I asked them to make it with turkey.

I once told a friend with a glass eye to sleep with one eye open.  

The glass eye was always open.

Do these things happen to everyone, or is it just me?  There are days when I feel like I might have hatched on the face of another planet and stowed away to earth on the underbelly of the mars space rover.  After so many foot-in-mouth moments and ridiculous physical happenings, you start to wonder if maybe it’s only you that seems to need around-the-clock safety gear and a shock collar muzzle. 

I’ve mentioned the eating tuna under the dining room table episode, as well as the toxic poisoning from feeding dolls cough syrup incident.  Other happenings include sliding underneath a horse while riding behind the saddle and having a tiny deer tongue a twenty-dollar bill from the depths of my pant pocket while visiting the zoo (the first time my parents let me hold my own money).  I’ve skied into a metal pole and had the ice cream machine in my college dining hall explode on me.  Twice.

In elementary school I talked to frogs and my toothbrush, but not to men with beards.

I used to unravel paperclips and wrap them around my teeth to pretend I had a retainer like my sister.  I must have envied the way she had to clean out food debris after meals and soak it in Fixodent before bed, which as you know, is totally understandable.

When I was a sophomore in college, I sported a hairstyle that is now commonly referred to by my friends and husband as the crow.  It was an attempt at a short, hip cut, but looked more like I had gotten gum stuck in my hair, and had to chop off all the sticky bits.

Another danger contained by the good work of the New York Football Giants.

Only they were everywhere.  I looked like an inverted tulip after a terrible rendezvous with a weedwacker.

As children, my sister and I might have lacked all common sense and any grip on reality.   During much of our youth, half of our house was in the framing stage of construction, and rather than play with dolls or stuffed animals, Renee and I would nail or staple lace veils to random timber slats and draw faces on them.  While Ken and Barbie were hitting Rodeo Drive in her pink convertible, our wooden babies were getting married in a construction work zone. 

One of these days all of my bad stories, incoherent jokes and bodily accidents are going to catch up with me, and humankind is going to put me in a permanent time out.  Which will be followed by an awkward, uncomfortable silence, because even Mars won’t want me back.