On life as a walking disaster
To a casual observer, it’s not always immediately obvious that I lack the coordination most people take for granted. It’s not as though I spontaneously fall over when I’m standing still, and for the most part I seem to have outgrown my tendency to misjudge the position of an open door and smack directly into the doorframe instead. I also don’t have many problems with sports involving coordination – I run up a mountain and go rock climbing several times a week, and I’ve yet to fall to my death during either of these activities. I don’t topple over in the middle of a yoga pose, and years ago I was involved in both figure skating and horseback riding without any particularly major incidents. And yet, despite all this evidence to the contrary, it’s undeniable: I am a klutz.
The defining moment, the one that permanently branded me with this label and the one that I’ll never, ever manage to live down took place oh so many years ago, on my first day of high school. And if there’s ever a time when first impressions matter more than on the first day of high school, I’ve yet to discover it. There I was: Incredibly nerdy, probably dressed in some tragically uncool outfit that I had spent weeks agonizing over, and stepping into my homeroom class for the very first time. Somehow – and I’m still not sure exactly how this happened, probably because my mind is intentionally blurring the painful details here – I managed to take a step backwards, directly into the corner of a recycling bin. Before I knew what was going on, I had unceremoniously landed in the recycling bin as thirty pairs of judgemental teenage eyes bored into me from across the room. Try living that one down.
Of course, not all incidents were quite so mortifying. My klutzy tendencies thankfully started to diminish with time, which meant that over the years I’ve progressed from regularly smacking into walls and falling up flights of stairs to smaller, more subtle incidents: Walking into the corner of a table just hard enough to get a few strange looks, spilling a few drops of coffee onto a new white t-shirt, or closing my purse strap into the car door without realizing it and then trying to walk away while holding the purse.
Occasionally, though, I’ll still do something so massively klutzy that I spend the next ten minutes wishing the ground would open up and swallow me whole just so I don’t have to face the embarrassment anymore. A few months ago, for example, just after a nine hour transatlantic flight and in a jet-lagged haze, I walked face-first into a glass wall in the airport while one of those moving sidewalks whisked an audience of decidedly more graceful travellers smoothly past me.
Last week, I made the mistake of running through Mt. Douglas Park (and naturally, up and then down the mountain) only hours after a rainstorm. I’m sure you can envision what ended up happening here: My foot made contact with a patch of soggy moss, sending me sliding down about five metres of solid rock before splashing to a halt in the middle of the world’s largest mud puddle. There are few things less amusing than completing an already fairly challenging run while literally covered in mud (and, okay, some blood too) – it was inside my shoes, it was caking my (white, obviously) tank top, it was even smeared on my cheeks like some kind of particularly hardcore war paint.
And just in case you’re not already wondering how I even manage to make it through one day without ending up dead, I just have to mention the evening when I reached into the oven to retrieve my dinner – an oven that had been baking at 450 degrees for the past hour – and somehow managed to sear my arm with the edge of the oven rack. Oven mitts? No, what I really need is full-length oven sleeves. Or maybe, while we’re at it, I should just go ahead and encase myself in a body cast. It might come in handy.
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