Last night, the co-host of a birthday party I attended gave me a hug, and said, “I’m so glad you came,” to which I replied, “Really? Because I don’t think you know my name.” And even though he thought I was Jamie, I was still being a jerk.
I can be just as reckless with my body. Take this summer: I scrapped my leg against a nail at Sleep No More, tripped twice while running, and got a light concussion from mountain biking, or more accurately, from getting the mountain bikes out of the car. My most recent scab reaches another scar I got from slicing my knee open on a bathtub faucet.
Part of the problem is a lack of depth perception. The other thing to blame is a happy childhood spent in scabs. I had a lot of fun playing sports I wasn’t good at. But the skin always came back to my elbows and knees, and I never broke a bone or had a bloody nose. The only consequence to my carelessness I can remember was in 4th grade. I was riding my bike down a hill, swerving along the line where the asphalt met itself, and I fell and hit my chin. My mom had made goulash that night, and I couldn’t chew any of the meat.
There’s no larger point to this story except that I have a feeling I’m going to be an old lady who walks into an armoire, breaks her hip, and that’s that. Or that’s that plus some slow years in a wheelchair. And there’s nothing to do until then but take a multi-vitamin, which I don’t even do. Maybe I’ll start in 2013. It would be a nice compliment to my 2010 New Year’s resolution, which was to start cleaning out cuts and applying Neosporin.