"Sometimes I amaze even myself." -- Han Solo
"That doesn't sound too hard." -- Leia Organa
sometimes i amaze even myself with the depths of my stupidity... it's mostly in the mundane aspects of life, not stuff like "three plus three is five!" or "i'll just drive to england" {from kentucky}, but completely banal and stupid stuff. for example, last night and this morning...
i'm doing dishes last night. we have a dishwasher (the appliance, not craig), but it began leaking a while back and the landlord simply disconnected it. so, we have to wash our dishes. since craig has come into the zero cash flow, we've begun cooking instead of dining out, so this is an issue... and it was my turn to do the dishes from the barbecued chicken. i washed and scrubbed and all that, reminiscing about the year we lived on waller with no amenities beyond a flush toilet... then i pulled the stopper, turned on the water, and started the disposal. as you might expect, the disposal started a downward suction that pulled on the water in the sink. the stopper, which i'd very smartly left in the bottom of the sink, got caught up in the undertow and lodged itself in the drain. so i turned off the disposal (at least one neuron was firing) and reached in to pull out the stopper... but it had gone in upside down, so that the handle was on the bottom, out of reach. no problem, there's a little edge exposed, so i pulled on it --- no dice. the disposal had created a partial vacuum underneath and was pulling harder on the stopper than i was... i said a few choice words, then reached for the tongs, the skewers, anything i could find that might help me get a grip on the tiny flange of metal on the underside (now the exposed topside) of the stopper without resorting to cutting the rubber around its edge. finally, bailed the water out of the right side of the sink into the left side (a split sink, of course), then used a butter knife to break the seal and relieve the vacuum. then the stopper let loose, and a little bit of leverage on the barbecue fork freed the stopper, but more importantly, freed me from having to explain myself to my roommates and my landlord. [and so here i am confessing it with intention of putting it on the web... hey, more stupidity!]
but that's not all!
as i'm getting really tired, i walked to the living room to retrieve my strat so as to wipe down the strings and put it to bed for the night. right about this time, andy's turned on the tv to a rerun of saturday night live, starting out with wayne and garth talking about the movies they watched this week. i, of course, am captivated, stupefied. i stand in the middle of the living room, with the strat standing in front of me, leaning the end-pin on the toe of my right shoe, holding the headstock in my hand, and bouncing the guitar up and down absent-mindedly with my toes as i stare at the television. after a moment, there's a slight prick on the pad of my right thumb, which quickly turns into a sharp pain... i look down and see my thumb next to the tuning post of the first string (plain steel, gauge 0.010), with the short needle-like slack end of the string buried in my flesh. ouch. i pull the thumb away quickly... no visible wound... squeeze the thumb to produce a small bead of blood... very much like one of those diabetes blood test... and now i have a small bruise in the center of my thumb. luckily, typing utilizes only the side of the thumb...
of course, i've done the string-thru-flesh trick before... once (several years ago), before i'd had a chance to trim the strings after re-stringing, i reached up to grab a tuning key and ran the first string (gauge 0.009 at that time) clean through my index finger. but that one didn't hurt... and didn't bruise.
i thought that was a little bit funny, so i put the guitar away, and sucked on my thumb for a moment as i went back to the computer to describe the incident to a friend. the screen was dark, so i moved the mouse to wake up the screen from the screen saver. nothing happened. i hit a few random keys on the keyboard... nothing. ah, so my graphics card has decided to start flaking out again after over a year of flawless operation; usually it leaves a pattern of painful-looking vertical streaks, but i can't really say what's causing it, so who's to say this is abnormal? so, i just hit the reset button, and then decided i was too tired to wait for the five-minute fsck on a 2gig partition, and just hit the power switch. my linux system will hate me today. but i guess that's not really my stupidity...
well, i guess impaling my thumb isn't all that funny... unless you heard andy say, "well, duh, that's how you're suppose to play, with the string stuck in your thumb..."
and after i went to bed, andy's girlfriend showed up. i heard them talking in the living room as i drifted off to sleep. when i got up this morning and finally came out of my room, i see on the floor in front of the couch her shoes, her backpack, and.... omigod tell me that's not her flowered underwear on the living room floor! i stand in a sleepy stupor, and stare. then i realize that i don't have my glasses on yet, and i'm blind as a bat in the morning anyway with the bleary eyes... so i lean over just a touch and look a little closer --- it's a section of the sunday comics, crumpled up. it looks like it had been used as wrapping paper. i stand up to full height and look again. it looks absolutely nothing like flowered underwear. so i retreat across the room a ways and look again from a distance... and well, the way it's sitting on the floor, the play of light and shadow, the curl and crumple... it kinda looks like a pair of discarded flowered panties... but only if you don't look too closely.
who would think that? i would, because i'm stupid.
Tue May 4 19:04:04 EDT 1999