Put Me In An Asylum and I'd Still Hurt Myself

I have the running joke that I could hurt myself sitting down in a padded room with nothing else in it. This, in fact, is not so much of a joke as it is a play on the awful truth. If put to the test, I could do the above without even trying. If I tried, it would never happen. It only happens when I try to be careful. To back this up, I have a few stories to tell. These all happened in a two hour period on the same night.

Recently, my mom had to work some night shifts taking care of an elderly lady to supplement some extra income while she gets her real estate career up and going. She knows my penchant for getting hurt, mixed with the fact that I’m sick and it only gets worse at night. She told me to please be careful and not kill myself while she was gone. She should not have said this, because this naturally meant I was going to manage to hurt myself, and only because I was trying to be careful.

The night started out simple enough. I decided to take a bath. How can one really hurt themselves taking a bath? Okay, I realize there are ways, but I’ve taken thousands of baths in my life. I would be fine. This was one of the biggest lies I ever told myself.

And what did I do, you wonder? I was sitting in the bathtub all happy, my back up against the tub, soaking and reading a magazine. I have no idea what happened or how to replicate such, but the next thing I knew it I was completely immersed in the water. How I slid under while sitting and not moving is beyond me, and it took me a few seconds to get my head back out and readjust myself. Once I did I laughed and joked to myself that, that was my official attempt to kill myself while trying to be careful, and I would be fine from now on in. I got it out of my system.

This was a nice thought I had, but it was severely and dangerously wrong.

A little while later I headed into the bathroom to wash some tea hair dye out of my hair. I get showers on a regular basis, naturally, so this was nothing new. I hopped in the shower, got halfway done with my hair, and then my body decided to fall right on over and meet the floor. I’ve never fallen while getting a shower. I’ve fallen getting out of the shower since we have a garden tub with a step, but it was just a given that I’d wipe out on the step regardless of the treads we put on it. To top it off, I still have no idea how in the hell I managed to fall while getting a shower.

At this point, I realized that if I tried to do anything else physical, I would most likely find a way to kill myself. I was not yet hurt, so if I had half a brain in my head, I would just lie down and call it a night. It was late anyway.

This was exactly what I did. Remote in hand, I laid down on the couch and began channel surfing. Now, folks, I lie on the couch every single night and watch a little bit of television. I’ve never gotten hurt doing so. Okay, so with me it’s not safe to say never. Rarely, may be the better phrase, but that’s beyond the point.

I was minding my very own business, when I moved to readjust myself and somehow managed to flop off of the couch where my head promptly made a date with the coffee table. Every damn day I sit on this couch and never had this happen. I guess I was living up to some unknown status quo. At this point I just gave up and went to bed. When I woke up, I had no known new bruises. The key word here could quite possibly be “known.”

They say you learn a new lesson everyday, and trust me, I did. Just for the record the lesson that day: I should never live alone. Period. If I so much as think about it I am obviously writing my own death sentence.

Let me also point out that today I happened to be around a bunch of bees, ones in which I had to pass several times. I never once got stung. Folks, how does this work?

While I was out today, my mom and myself got behind a horrible driver which reminded me of a story that happened about two years ago, but never fails to make me laugh. I must share.

Awhile back they were widening the roads in our little town. I use the term town loosely. What we actually have is one two lane road that spans a half of a mile, with businesses heavily lining both sides of the road. PennDOT made the decision to put an extra turning lane it. It was about time. This was the first good idea they had...ever. The way they went about it, however, it was very indigenous to the genius that define that company.

While I tell this story, please keep in mind that the main point of our town is that it is a port for both FedEx and UPS, as well as a tourist and trucker stop over, as several roads merge here. There is this one road that goes straight through town, and unless you live here, it is very difficult to bypass the main road to get from one side of that half mile stretch of road, to another. If you do have to go out around, instead of traveling a simple half mile, you end up traveling about ten minutes around. We live in the country here, kids.

With common sense in mind, this would tell PennDOT that the smart way to handle widening the road would consist of doing one of two things. One would be to only shut down one lane while they worked on digging out one side of the road at a time as not to confuse and stop traffic. Two would be to work on this in the middle of the night, since the hotels sit far enough back off of the road that the people sleeping in them would not be disrupted, and everyone would be mostly hunkered in for the night.

PennDOT did neither. Instead, they chose rush hour to shut down a quarter of mile right in the middle of the busiest part of the road. On one side of the road was the only bridge to every highway needed, and on the other side of that half mile were the hotels. This obviously caused problems, not to mention that UPS can’t get their trucks down the small back roads to even get to any of the highways. Obviously this caused problems.

Then there was me, totally unknowing that PennDOT was going to be dumb enough to do this in the middle of the day. I ordered a pizza. I went to get said pizza, only to realize that I was a quarter of a mile from Pizza Hut and had to back up and go ten minutes around just to get it. I thought about giving up, but there was no food in the house and I was hungry. There were just a few back roads standing between myself and yummy, yummy pizza, so of course I made the ridiculous decision to go around.

As soon as I turned around, a van pulled right out in front of me by turning around in the middle of the road, almost hitting me. I was angry, but not as angry as I was about to be. Said van was obviously lost. I realized this when he started to drive in front of me quite quickly, but then would suddenly stop dead in the middle of the road until I caught up with him. I couldn’t figure out what the person driving the van was doing until I put my turn signals on, only to watch him make a sharp turn in front of me and go the way my turn signal had indicated. It quickly hit me what was going on.

We began our travel down the back roads, all of which have large hills, lots of blind spots and lots of sharp turns. Instead of the van driving slowly, he would once again go quite fast, and then all of a sudden I would turn a corner and almost rear end him going a nice, cool 25 miles an hour, because the roads were too dangerous to go much faster. After putting my turn signals on several times to have him turn suddenly in front of me, and almost hitting him a half dozen times in five minutes, I was ready to eat him.

The moral of the story: if you’re going to try to find your way around by going the same way someone else is, at least pull over into someone’s driveway and get behind that person, instead of almost causing them to wreck.

The situation got more dangerous when cars started to pile up behind me. It was no longer feasible for me to stop dead to keep from hitting this moron that had a penchant for stopping on the most blind turns possible. I was going to get rear ended, and this guy was being incredibly rude by not just getting behind me. Because it is in my good nature to politely continue showing a tourist the proper way to go, I did the nicest thing possible and deceived him.

We were coming up to a T in the road, and having caught on to his game, I put on my turn signal to go right. As expected, the driver took the bait. I then quickly switched my turn signal to the left and sped on out of there as the driver of the van sat stopped in the middle of the road waiting for me to catch up to him. I swear I could hear the people behind me cheer as they all hurried out of the road, several of them cutting the van off as he tried to turn around. At this point, after this van had almost caused several accidents, no one wanted the van in front of him.

So when you’re driving, please remember if you want to follow someone and are lost, it’s customary to pull over and get behind said person. As long as you don’t ride the person’s ass and consistently stop so fast you almost hit them on purpose, they will much oblige to showing you the proper way to go.

I’m going to end this post simply by telling Zoe that I will write you on Facebook, since she is an amazingly sweet girl.