Life’s been kind of a disaster.
A thrilling, hilarious, hard-to-tear-my-eyes-away-from-it disaster, but a disaster nonetheless. I’ve already covered my phone getting stolen on the road and now, in the past week, I both lost (and recovered) my house keys and had a glass wall separating my shower shatter spontaneously. And then on Friday, on my way to a going-away dinner for a friend (at a Chinese-Italian fusion restaurant that serves pumpkin ragu jiaozi and rice bruschetta!), I mistook a rainy black pool for the very similarly shaded rainy black pavement in the twilight. I wish I had a video of this, because instead of stepping on hard ground, I plunged into the freezing water – coat, bag, shoes, and all.
If my life were a Nora Ephron movie, this would have been that part where the hunky account executive sweeps me out of the pool, with an afghan conveniently in his arms, leads me to his nearby penthouse, and we have chlorine-scented sex on his couch. But, alas, life is not a rom-com.
In real life, an old grandfather reproaches you for not looking where you were going (fair), hands you a pack of Kleenex (ineffective), and tries to hold back laughter as you turn your purse upside down to drain the water out of it.
I still made it to dinner. I couldn’t not show up after being just a block away. I sat through the shrimp-wasabi rice bruschetta, the salmon carpaccio with mayo, and the orange marmalade and goat cheese zucchini rolls soaking wet, because giving up and going home would have been giving in to the disaster that my life had become.
When I was with the Scouts, up a mountain somewhere, I once saw someone jump in a puddle and disappear up to his head in a bog. Believe me, to everybody else, it is funny. It’s also the sort of memory where you think: “can that be true?”, and “did that really happen?”, but I’m pretty sure it did.
Full marks for carrying on to the party though.
Thank you! I had the sneaking suspicion that if I showered and went home, it’d be too difficult to get back. This is the kind of thing that makes me wish I carried a spare set of clothes with me, as horribly impractical as that would be.