There are truths about yourself that must be faced and accepted, no matter how much you wish them to be false. In my case, one of those truths is that I am a clutz. This is despite my deep desire to be graceful and coordinated and many attempts such as yoga, dance classes and so on to reverse this. I think these things negate a certain amount of the clutziness, but it can never be destroyed.
I am being reminded of this at the moment because I’m going through a particularly clutzy period. It seems that at least once an hour, I drop something or trip on something (that generally isn’t there) or something like that. However, in the past couple of days there’s been two sterling examples of my clutziness, they being:
a) I almost broke my thumb trying to turn on the bathroom light and:
b) I dropped a box of six two-litre cola bottles on my head.
I’m going to assume you’re interested in hearing the stories of the above and keep going :) So, Friday night after the fabulous Japanese dinner, I’ve gotten home and stepped into the hallway on my way to bed, only to stop when I realised that I hadn’t turned the light on and it was in fact too dark to see where I was going. “No problem,” says I to myself, “I’m standing near the bathroom, so I’ll turn on that light”. Now, important piece of info – bathroom light is on the hall-side of the door-frame. So I swing my hand up to reach for the light switch, thinking I was about 40 centimetres from the door, only to discover I’m in fact standing almost inside the doorframe and bang – my hand, with my thumb leading, slams into the wood just a few centimetres from where it began its ascent.
Cue much swearing. I was concerned that it would be too swollen the next day to go to work, but luckily it’s just got one of those bone-deep bruises that you don’t notice until you touch it, and that only happens when I get change out of the till drawer…
Anyway, so there I am at work, cursing my clutziness as I nurse my thumb through the day, and I go to tidy up the drinks aisle. Some clever chappy had decided, there not being enough room to put the excess boxes of cola bottles in the right place, to put them on top of the pile of mixed-can packs, at a height slightly above my eye level.
You can already see it coming, can’t you? Yes, I moved those boxes and yes, at one point, one slipped and landed on my cheek. Cue much swearing. But things like this are an occupational hazard at word, and so I shrugged it off and kept going, and it did stop hurting soon, so I thought nothing more of it.
Until I went for my tea break, looking in the mirror as I was washing my hands and thought “Hang on, I have a black eye. How did that happen?”
*sigh*
So yes, Nicole the clutz is in full swing at the moment. Luckily, when God realised he’d forgotten to program my brain for any form of co-ordination, he decided to balance things out by making me extremely pliable and bouncy, so I rarely get badly hurt from my escapades. So for example, when I slipped on the frozen peas that I dropped at work the other day (they double very nicely as ball-bearings), I landed with a thud but was able to (carefully) get up again and start cleaning up.
But feel for my poor husband, who as he stood in the kitchen yesterday and watched the cake-tin wobble around on the floor after I’d dropped it, looked at me and shook his head and said “You’re such a clutz.”
Yeah. I know.