Chronicles of Clumsiness

I've always been kind of a clumsy girl. I don't know where this awkwardness comes from, as I don't really think my mom or dad are particularly clumsy. And not only do I manage to do a lot of clumsy things, but I also seem to find myself in awkward situations all the time. I don't know what it is.

One time when I was just a young teenager, I was in the waiting room at the eye doctor's. I was trying on sunglasses just to pass the time, but in a moment of particular adolescent gawkiness, I somehow managed to knock over the entire sunglasses display. It made a horribly loud noise, made even more pronounced by the fact that the waiting room was very small and full of prim and proper British people. I froze and just stood there, wide-eyed, staring at the graveyard of sunglasses at my feet. And to make matters worse, the doctor chose that very moment to come out and call my name for my appointment.

"Courtney Green," he said, surveying the mess in the waiting room with concern.

I started to walk towards him.

"Um...aren't you going to clean those up?" he asked.

Utterly humiliated, I nodded, put my head down, and quietly walked back to the jumble of glasses on the floor. Talk about embarrassing.

I've also never been very good at walking. I've improved in the last few years, but there was that time during finals week of my first semester at Southeastern. I was walking down the stairs with my roommate, running late for one of our finals, when I tripped over my own feet and fell down three or four stairs, spraining my ankle in the process. Being the over-achieving idiot that I am, I decided to go ahead and limp all the way to my class with my roommate helping support me, just so I didn't have to miss my final. I went ahead and took the test, and everything seemed to be all right, until right near the end. My ankle started to throb and began hurting rather intensely. I quickly colored in the last few circles on my scantron, because in all honesty, I just wanted to get out of there as the pain was getting to be too much to handle. But as I stood up, I realized I had a serious problem. Even the slightest bit of pressure on my foot was pretty much unbearable. I didn't really know what to do, as my roommate was still working intently on her test, along with the only other friend I had in the class. I didn't want to tell the teacher, since he was kind of creepy, so I just sort of stood there by my desk with my test in my hand. I began to feel like everyone was staring at me, so it then became a battle between the excruciating pain in my ankle and my self-consciousness-guess which one won. I walked as well as I could to the front of the class, put my test on the table, and hobbled out of the room, praying no one had noticed me. Once outside, I had no choice but to just sit down on the ground and wait for my friends-I had already used my foot way more than I should have in my prideful endeavor not to ask anyone for help. So there I sat. It took about fifteen minutes for my roommate to get her butt out there, and by that point the pain had managed to increase somehow. I called to her from my seat on the ground.

"What are you doing?" she asked, looking at me in surprise.

"I can't walk," I stated, matter-of-factly.

She ran off to try and find someone with a golf cart to come and get me. In the meantime, my other friend came out of the classroom and saw me sitting there. He called the nurse, then waited with me until she arrived. She examined my ankle and decided that it was indeed sprained and that I needed to stay off it and elevate it for the next few days. She said she would give me a ride back to my dorm in her car, but I couldn't even make it to her car. So...here comes the best part...my friend, who just happened to be a rather skinny guy, had to CARRY me to her car. I could tell he was struggling. That probably goes down as one of the most awkward moments in my life.

Anyway, it struck me just how incredibly uncoordinated I am the other day at this restaurant. I have been going there a lot lately to use the free WiFi so that I can do stuff for grad school and all that. I have a particular table that I like to sit at-a high top right by the window, and, more importantly, right by a power outlet. Usually my favorite table is open for me, but on this one particular day, I noticed someone's purse and cell phone sitting on the table. Since I was trying to balance my food and drink, I decided to just go ahead and pick a seat, so I chose a table right next to my favorite table and set my laptop up there. My computer has a very short battery life, so I was in desperate need to plug it in, but unfortunately I didn't see any other power outlets near enough to my table. The closest one was the one that I always use, but I couldn't get to it because I would have to like weave my cord in right next to the other table, and by this point in time, a lady had taken up residence at it and didn't really look like she was going anywhere anytime soon. My only options were to wait for her to leave so I could steal her table, or move all my stuff to some other part of the restaurant. Well, when my battery had about 20% left, the lady at the other table got up to get her order. Yes! I thought to myself. Moving into action, I quickly grabbed my cord and sort of tried to toss it over to the other side of the table-that didn't work. I looked over my shoulder really quickly to make sure the lady wasn't coming back, because I figured it might look kind of odd to see some strange girl crawling around by her stuff. I got down on my hands and knees, crawled under the lady's table, and just as I went to pull the cord that last little bit further, it stopped-the outlet was 4 inches too far away. I quickly crawled out from under her table, but I'm pretty sure she saw me. Wonderful. Well, I quickly finished off my lunch, and then decided to move all my stuff over to the couch nearby, as I could see an outlet right behind it. In the process of carrying all my stuff, I somehow managed to drop and spill my drink. Once that little crisis was taken care of, I attempted to carry all my belongings at the same time-laptop, notebook, power cord, purse, jacket....yeah, that was hard. I just realized what a moron I must have looked. My mouse, which was still plugged into my laptop, had fallen and was just hanging there, swinging with each step I took. There were cords hanging everywhere, my notebook was haphazardly clutched between my hand and my hip, and my purse had fallen off my shoulder and was hanging at that awkward spot right above the elbow. Wow.

Anyway...long story short...I'm a mess. Someone recently used the word "eccentric" to describe me. At first I was a little taken aback, as I didn't really think I was crazy cat lady status, which is totally what I think of when I hear the word eccentric. But the more I think about it, and the more I process these situations I find myself in and the strange things I do...I think the word eccentric is just about perfect.