Five Completely Dumb Things I’ve Done...

…in no particular order

1. When I was a kid, despite knowing I should stay away from electrical outlets, I still tried to plug my plastic iron’s plastic cord in, just in case (also, don’t put me near signs that say “Wet Paint”). When I got up off the floor, with my hair sticking straight up and a snootful of electrically fried plastic smell, I decided that maybe staying away from electrical outlets would be a good general principle after all.

2. I took a driving test in a car that was really amazingly awful. The horn didn’t work, so I had a rubber ducky that I used as a horn. My three-point turn, because of stiff steering bits, was more of a five point and big smile at the examiner turn. It wouldn’t go over 45 miles per hour without shimmying and making scary clunking noises. The headlights chose their own brightness, pretty whimsically, which made night driving extra spicy. I passed the test, though. Maybe the examiner just wanted to get the hell out of the scary car with the dangerously perky (it was a sham; I was embarrassed and scared shitless) driver.

3. I sat in a train station in Paris and pelted pigeons with dried chunks of baguette. I was frustrated and hungry, and the damned baguette was inedibly hard. Even the Parisian pigeons snubbed it. I beaned one big b*stard pretty hard in its tiny head and got cussed at (in lovely French) by an old lady.

4. In high school, my best friend and I went to see a sci-fi movie. When we bought our tickets, the clerk looked at us funny, and pointed us to the correct theater (one of three). We were a little late, so we squinched into some seats in the back so we wouldn’t disturb people. We watched the screen for a few minutes and realized that a whole lot of people were having a lot of sloppy sex. My friend poked me and said, “I thought this was going to be a sci-fi movie”. I said, “Maybe it’s alien sex. Maybe it’ll be over soon.” We decided to tough out the alien sex until a few seats away we heard a guy, well, you know, doing the Pee Wee Herman thing. We looked at each other in embarrassment and left. We checked the marquee; it was supposed to be the sci-fi movie. We asked the clerk, and he said we’d gone in the wrong theater, but we hadn’t – the sci-fi movie was listed on the sex movie theater. So, in the spirit of adventure, my friend and I went back in and watched the porn. It was yucky, and we were the only girls in there, which was also yucky. The sci-fi movie was next, but we left halfway through because we were still stunned and kind of numb from the porn, so we headed for a coffee shop and spent a lot of time looking at each other in VERY BRIGHT LIGHT, drinking coffee and saying, “Well…Holy shit.”

5. I got very, very drunk in my late teens, and spent the night at my stepbrother’s house. His wife took in stray animals, and I woke up covered in cats. I thought I was hallucinating, or having the dt’s or something. I got up to go wee and had to pry cats off my head, my neck and my arms. When I sat down on the throne, thinking I was in a fur-free zone, the window clicked. I looked up, and there was a cat, sitting in the window, watching me wee. I had to scrape cats off my pillow to get back in bed, and the sound of all that purring and scratching totally freaked out my still-drunk self. I have not gotten snockered since, and I don’t have any cats. I wonder why?

Here’s to a wiser weekend!