Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Muddling my way through life

When I registered for my Family Law class this semester I decided not to pay $20 for a semester long parking pass. Insteaed I decided to pay $1 everytime I parked on campus. This was in a miserly attempt to save two dollars, since there are actually only 19 classes, and I skipped the first one. While handling the parking fees in this fashion may not necessarily sound like a good idea, it does sound plausible. That's assuming that I'm the sort of person that has a $1 bill in their possession every Wednesday evening. Unfortunately it would seem that I am not such a person.

I was sitting here at my desk and right about 5pm it occurred to me that I had turned all of my $1 bills into quarters for laundry last week. By "all of my $1 bills" I mean the two that I had, which still proved to be insufficient to actually complete my laundry. I wound up leaving town with wet clothes draped all over the stair railing. I handed off a pair of soggy blue jeans to Lynn at lunch the next day, who generously offered to take them home and throw them in her dryer, and then transport them to Seattle for me so I could wear them to the game.

With the laundry fiasco behind me, I hadn't given my cash shortage a second thought...until now. However, I have a coworker who has loaned me a dollar. It was a bit humiliating to have to beg a dollar bill off of a coworker, but thankfully she seemed more amused by it than anything.
I like to think that this type of flakiness is more the exception to how I operate, than the rule, but today I have paused to wonder. I was on a date last night and we were talking about hiking. I brought up Half-Dome. Why I brought it up I'm not certain, since it was far from being my finest hour. Not only did I bring it up, but then I proceeded to openly admit to having embarked on that hike with a solitary bottle of water, and we're not talking about a big bottle either, just your standard sized bottle. As if that wasn't bad enough, I also decided to not use my "good" hiking boots, because I didn't want to damage those. So instead I wore this ratty pair that were probably 10 years old and developed a hole in the sole by the end of the hike. I did somehow managed to get all the way up to the bottom of the cables, where I at least made some demonstration of common sense and once it started raining I decided to heed the warnings about getting fried by lightening and unfortunately never completed the hike. In short I'm pretty sure my date was pretty baffled by all of this. How could he not be really? I'm baffled by it. Sarah was the one hiking with me, and I cannot even begin to describe to you the look I got when she discovered the size of my water supply...and then the shoes... I don't know how many times she asked me on the way down the mountain "what were you thinking?" Well obviously I wasn't.
Sarah also asked me one time how it is that I manage to muddle my way through everyday life, which I considered to be an unbelievably rude thing to say to someone. After thinking about it today, maybe there's something to it. Granted, Half Dome was an extreme example, and on the whole I think I function just fine, but it would seem that I may be slightly more prone to an occasional stutter in my thought processes than some.

4 comments:

Meredith said...

Need we revisit the incident when you were interviewing for a teaching job in LA and failed to bring cash for parking? Or the time you showed up in Guatemala without a functional debit card or enough clothing? Wait the clothing thing isn't confined to a single trip.

Sarah said...

Seriously, you always make me sound so harsh. Am I really that harsh? Anyway, I meant the muddling thing in an endearing way; it hasn't stopped me from launching out on trips with you.

Julia said...

I don't think you're harsh, but I do think I've done things that left you feeling pretty astonished.

Natalie | Make Today Great said...

That's totally harsh! I think we all muddle through life, but maybe I'm completely alone in that?