A few months back, at the height of election foolishness, President Bush was asked if he had made any mistakes in his first term in office. In a moment that he probably still regrets, he said that he couldn’t remember making any.
I admire his spirit of amnesia. As someone who is haunted by the specter of every gaff, goof, error and error I have ever made, I sincerely wish I could erase the memory of a fraction of the times I have looked at my watch while holding a cup of coffee, drenching my lap with hot coffee, only to discover that I wasn’t wearing a watch to begin with (and indeed, never wear a watch).
Many of you - especially those of you with a lot of time on your hands or who are careless about reading the directions on your prescription pain medication - have asked if I have made any mistakes over the past year. It’s a pity that you can’t hear my bitter, hollow laugh (I’ve spent a lifetime working on it and it’s pretty good) as I look back on the past year in stupidity.
It is still technically January (okay – I’ve been a little lax with my deadlines) and as such, I can get away with looking over my biggest mistakes of the past year. As I do so, I am somewhat spoiled for choice. If we look at every stupid thing I’ve done over the past year – the times I got lost driving to work, for instance (the same school where I have taught for the past four years) or the cumulative hours spent in public restrooms trying to flush infrared toilets – this column would run far too long and take up valuable classified advertising space. No, in order to qualify for the biggest acts of stupidity in 2004, a particular bonehead maneuver has to have involved a fundamental misinterpretation of the nature of reality – boneheadedness on a metaphysical level.
As such, an honorable mention has to go to the ten minutes (ten minutes!) I spent early one morning trying to unlock the door to my classroom at school with my car keys.
I kept pointing my remote-door-unlocker at the door and pressing the smaller “unlock” button. After a minute or so, I realized that this wasn’t working and stared at it really hard to make sure that I wasn’t pressing the big “lock” button, then pointed and pressed again for another minute or so. This was followed by thirty seconds or so of arguing aloud with the door (“Come ON!!!! What’s the matter with you, Stupid Door!?”) before deciding to attempt a manual entry. I was still trying to cram my car keys into the lock, when the school’s custodian came by and rescued me.
In this same vein, a well-deserved salute has to go to that lady in a parking lot last month who played with my mind like a kitten with a ball of wool. I was just leaving a department store and, as usual, could not remember where I had parked. I had my shopping cradled in one arm and my car keys held above my head as I tried to locate my car by beeping for it with the same remote-control-thingee. A woman with a small child in a stroller came out of the store about that time and saw me standing like some confused and overweight Statue of Liberty. She pressed her own remote-car-unlocker, thus making the car in front of me (her car) beep. By watching the movement of my hand very closely, she was able to time her beeping to my pressing and string me along for several perplexed minutes, while I stared intently at this car, which was much nicer than mine, but which apparently wanted to go home with me. If she hadn’t finally burst out laughing, I might still be there.
The Bronze Medal of Stupidity, 2004 goes to my inability to bake a pie without my kitchen sinking into a black hole of chaos and entropy:
During the holidays, I generally have to do more baking that you might expect. This comes less from my love of baking than from the pickiness of my family. I have a sister-in-law, for instance who refuses to eat pumpkin pie on the grounds that it is “brown – you know, like poo”. Instead, she asks for her own, less fecal-looking pie – a chocolate cream one. (While this lapse in logic pales in comparison to some of my own, it makes me feel less lonely.) In addition, there are requests for squash, berry and apple pies.
It was this year’s apple pie that did me in. After years of bitter experience, I finally remembered to put a baking sheet under the pie pan as I baked the pie, so that when hot, syrupy apple glop bubbled out, it would not become welded to the bottom of the oven. Unfortunately, this meant that as I pulled the pie out of the oven, the cookie sheet was crusty with apple crud. Wondering just how firmly this stuff was crusted onto the sheet and how hard it would be to scrub off later, I poked it with my bare finger.
It goes without saying that it wasn’t crusty at all and was, in fact pure, molten sugar, with a melting point of approximately a gazillion degrees. As I pulled my blistered finger away from the sheet and waved it in the air in a desperate attempt to cool it, a stringy web of sugar trailed behind it, floating on the air for a tantalizing second or two, before gently sinking down on me and bonding like napalm.
I have to admit that the language I used wasn’t particularly in the holiday spirit.
The second-stupidest thing I did last year happened online.
I have a spotty record with eBay. On the one hand, I have bought some really remarkably cool things in online auctions. On the other hand, I also have a bad habit of not reading all relevant information and have on several occasions found myself the proud owner of LP versions of CDs I wanted and reproductions of autographed photos.
On this occasion, however, I was trying to sell some old books. I had scanned sample pictures of various book covers and illustrations and was in the process of writing up descriptions of the books themselves. I was leafing through one of the antique books and was impressed with how nifty it was. As I often do at such times, I felt compelled to share this with my wife, who I called in from the next room.
“This is really cool!” I told her.
She agreed.
“You know,” I told her enthusiastically, “I might bid on this myself!”
She stared at me in semi-stunned silence for a few seconds, before rolling her eyes and walking away. It took me another minute or so to get why.
First place for stupidity, though, has to go to our first dinner at a nice restaurant with our new baby.:
Taking our baby into public is a good way of illustrating the fundamental differences in my wife’s and my personalities. When our baby starts fussing, my wife, who is painfully shy, takes him to the most remote corner of a cloakroom, where he won’t disturb any of the other diners. I, on the other hand, generally walk him around the restaurant and use him as a prop to meet people.
It was on this sort of tour last month, that I fell into conversation with a party at table on the far side of the restaurant from our table. By coincidence, they had a baby girl of about the same age as Junior. After a few minutes of banter, we all agreed that it would be hysterically funny if we switched babies to see how long it would take my wife to notice.
I had expected confusion and eye-rolling from my wife, but what I had not counted on was Linda Blaire’s voice from The Exorcist coming out of her mouth:
“Get”
“My”
“Baby”
“Back”
So, now I’m on restaurant probation. I sit at home, unable to operate locks with my sore finger and unable to open door by remote control, practically a prisoner in my own home.
