Thursday, March 13, 2008

Embarrassing Things I Have Somehow Survived

My college lecture classes were almost always in a room made of concrete steps, with a curved row of nailed-to-the-ground seats on each step. As one walked to the back of the room, one went up steps. Many steps. I liked to sit in the back, because I have this thing where I don't like to think of people sitting behind me looking at the mess that the back of my hair always is, and on the aisle, in case the building caught fire or my boyfriend beckoned to me from the hall, or a huge radioactive mutated Japanese monster was seen coming this way and we needed to exit quickly. (What, you don't have those nightmares?)

One day, I reached into my backpack to get a pen and a tampon fell out and rolled all the way down all those steps and came to rest against the podium behind which the professor was standing. He stopped lecturing, came out from behind the podium, and picked it up.

"Did someone lose this?" He asked the 500 students in the hall, 499 of whom were dying laughing. "I'll put it right here on the table and you can pick it up after the lecture."

And because I had another long lecture immediately after this one, and because it was the only tampon I had with me, and because I didn't have any money for the firecracker machine in the restroom, I walked up to the table after class and claimed it.

I tried to sit in a different spot in class after that, but my fear of Godzilla, fire, the back of my hair, and missing the boyfriend's beckon won out. For the rest of my life, however, I have always had a quarter in my pocket, just in case gravity decided to put a hate on me again.