In the days of my youth I had a hunger.
A hunger for knowledge. I was a full fledged nerdy nerd nerdfaced nerdperson. I got straight A’s. I had giant circular glasses before Harry Potter and hipsters made them cool. I had two rows of teeth (this was actually kind of cool and made me feel like a mutant shark person) because my adult teeth grew in before my baby teeth fell out on the bottom. I tried to cut my own bangs and as a result had peach fuzz and then razor-sharp-tiny-blades-of-death hairs on my forehead. I loved The X-Files so much that when we had to dissect a pig’s heart in 8th grade science I pretended that I was Dana Scully doing an autopsy complete with narration and humming of a the theme song.
All of this epic goofdom led to another hunger.
A hunger for after school snacks.
There was a period in high school where everyday when I arrived home I would eat an entire bag of microwave popped corn. Then a period that involved a lot of bean burritos (which is not so different from my life right now come to think of it…) But in junior high my ultimate jam, the king of all delicious snack foods, my go-to-in-a-hurry-gonna-eat-fifteen-slices-of-it snack was cinnamon toast. And not your fancy “baked by someone else” cinnamon toast, I’m talking about regular white bread jammed four slices at a time into my toaster, singed a golden brown and then slathered in butter before being doused with a rain of cinnamon and sugar. Cinnamon Toast.
One Sunday evening (probably before the rush to finish all of the homework that I inevitably put off until the last minute) I was laying around, most likely ogling the most beautiful man in the world Joey Fatone (remember I was 14)when I got a hankerin for cinnamon sugary goodness in my belly.
Our house was built in the seventies and has the weirdest kitchen floor I’ve ever seen. It’s this weird vinyl/laminate mutant of flooring that is black with a gold pattern of diamonds.
I really don’t know what it is, all I know is that every couple of months we have to wax it and it’s crazy slippery in socks. We must have just waxed it because I remember it being extra treacherous as I dragged a chair around to retrieve all of the ingredients (a shaker of cinnamon sugar, butter, bread)for my feast.
The toasting went well. A nice light brown all over, no burning on the crust.
The buttering just as splendid. A nice even coat, no un-melted lumps or accidental holes in the toast due to overenthusiastic spreading.
Then tragedy struck.
I had just begun to shake the inch thick layer of cinnamon and sugar over the buttered toast when I heard from the other room a haunting melody. It emanated forth like some siren song, seizing my heart and making my blood turn cold.
Was it a man on a Casio? NO.
Was it aliens finally come to take me home? NO.
Was it The X-Files? YES. And it was STARTING WITHOUT ME.
In all my laying and ogling I’d neglected to note the amount of time in which I had to make a snack before the show started.
I panicked.
I grabbed the shaker in both hands upending it over my toast in an attempt to hurry the process along and received a toxic cloud of seasoning all up in my nose holes.
– Now, bodies are great in situations like this. The brain goes to autopilot and starts sending all kinds of important messages like “Hey dummy you can’t breathe with all that in your nose, get rid of it!” and then you sneeze. And sneeze I did.
It was the kind of sneeze that would do a dirty old prospector proud. The kind of sneeze that when overheard makes one question if the sneezer is perhaps not sneezing at all but is in fact being murdered by someone with an axe.
This would have solved all of my problems except that I was still standing next to the counter and the force of the sneeze propelled my body forward and down.
In the slow motion playback of this scene you could clearly note the moment in the sneeze when I realized that I was going to get a face full o’counter and cleverly avoided it by throwing all of my weight to one side. Unfortunately you would also notice how off balance this made me. You might also notice my brand spanking new ultra bright white socks and how the shift of weight sent my feet flying out from under me. Then you would probably wince and point as I hit the ground head first.
I woke up fifteen minutes into the X-Files staring at the kitchen ceiling with a topless shaker of cinnamon sugar in one hand and a huge mess that would lead to more sneezing while I cleaned it up.
I told my mom the lump on my head was from falling while rollerblading.
Moral of the story: If we’d had TiVo back then I’d probably be a doctor now.
-B
I Should Probably Be Dead 