Incidents in the Life of a Dumbass

Do you ever look back on a situation or series of events and wonder what the hell is wrong with you?  Well, I do.  I'm incredibly clumsy, often irrational, and prone to extreme dramatics, which means there is usually at least one event every day where I have to shake my head at myself.  Some days, like yesterday, my entire day consists of a series of unfortunate events.  Last night, over the span of three hours, I did myself bodily harm, was attacked by an invasion of demonic crickets, and was woken up by the sounds of a chicken massacre.


The evening started out relatively calm.  I had my homework done early and was about to lay down for some veg-time before getting to sleep at a reasonable hour (for the first time in I don't know how long).  After getting into my PJs and washing my face, I remembered that I had picked up one of those oil-meets-bamboo-stick scent-diffuser thingymabobs (what are those damn things called?) that I wanted to put in my bathroom.

Simple enough, right?  Well, not when you are me, apparently.  I begin to open the package and realize that everything is child-proofed beyond belief.  Once I finally break through the plastic packaging, the little oil bottle seems just as impenetrable.  I pick away at the little metal barrier, reading the instructions (and, incidentally, the "DO NOT GET IN EYES OR MOUTH" warning) and wondering who decided you needed an engineering degree to access aromatics.  After getting everything off, I realize I have one more barrier - a seemingly innocuous rubber stopper.  I pry, I pull, I use tweezers, it's not budging.  So, putting on my Popeye hat, I grab that little sucker and give it all I've got.

Big mistake.  As I'm pulling and staring at the warning label, I suddenly feel the stopper give.  Sweet relief!  Which lasts only for the .009 seconds it takes for that sickeningly sweet smelling, warm, oily goo to explode all over my face.  I go into panic mode even before the pain kicks in, remembering the giant warning about not getting the oil in or around your eyes or mouth.  My left eye is sealed shut as I desperately try to keep the goo out of my mouth.  And then the pain kicks in.  I don't know what they put in that stuff, but my cheek and eyelid were on fire.

I stick my face under the faucet and desperately try to remove the oil, but it's still burning.  I reach over and blindly grab the first soft material I feel, wet it, and start scrubbing my skin.  But the pain intensifies and my nostrils are trying to tell me something that my brain is not processing.  I continue to scrub, desperate to get this junk off of my skin, when the new smell finally kicks in - after running out of cotton balls, I used an old towel to remove my nail polish.  My face feels like it's been bathed in napalm because I'm scrubbing it with a nail polish remover infused towel. 

Fast forward 45 minutes and I'm finally, FINALLY, able to open my eye without searing pain.  I douse myself with eye drops, throw some lotion on my raw cheek, and escape the bathroom, which now smells strangely like someone flooded it with vodka cranberry.  However, I don't get very far.

Before I move on to the next part, I need to provide context.  Every year, from the end of summer into Winter, I am plagued by the most disgustingly evil critters: spider crickets (here after referred to as "sprickets"), dun dun dun!  I don't know why they haunt me, but since I was a teenager, they have made it their mission to creep me the hell out.  Unlike regular crickets, they do not hop along on their way, singing a merry song, when you approach.  Oh no, spider crickets attack.  They wait behind doors, patiently preparing to spring on the unsuspecting as soon as the door is opened.  Vicious, I tell you, VICIOUS!  Is my fear of these little bastards irrational?  Yes, probably so.  Do I care? Nope!

So, I try to exit the bathroom -- which now inspires random bouts of PTSD -- only to find myself holed in by a small army of sprickets (well, ok, there were two, but they were HUGE).  Their tactics have improved - they no longer lay in wait in the garage, but have managed to hippity-hop up my stairs to torment me.  There I am, imprisoned in my vodka-cranberry bathroom, with no tools for defense except a plunger and aerosol hairspray.  But I am just crafty enough for combat with common bathroom tools.  Firm hold hairspray in one hand, plunger in the other, I head into battle.  

I am just going to make a few statements of fact and you can fill in the blanks for yourself.  Hairspray does not deter sprickets, it only pisses them off.  They jump high and far and have no qualms about savagely holding on to your pajama bottoms.  Plungers are not effective murder weapons.  High pitched screaming and thrashing achieves nothing more than whiplash, a sore throat, and a cat that looks at you like you've completely lost it.  Sprickets are ruthless.  Sucking sprickets up with a vacuum only causes a temporary relief.  Shoving whatever you can find into the tube of said vacuum after the POW have escaped and are successfully re-imprisoned, then placing vacuum in garage to deal with later, is a cowardly, though effective, means of eliminating the enemy.

This brings me two and a half hours beyond my bedtime.  Exhausted, in pain, traumatized, I fall into bed and hope sleep will consume me quickly.  Just as I'm about to drift off, it begins - the sounds of a brutal chicken-slaughtering.  I mean, what else could it be?  It's 2 in the morning and the neighbor's chickens are clucking and screeching like crazy.  It must be a bear, raccoon, or possum, come to pillage the poor hens.  For an hour, I try to drown out the horrifying sounds of the massacre, finally dropping into sleep with images of a bloody mound of chicken bodies and a fat raccoon, rubbing his stomach and looking around with beady little eyes filled with blood-lust.  (For the record, there were no causalities - all chickens were happily squawking as of this morning.  But it totally could have happened.)

An eventful night, to say the least.  In the light of day, however, my antics seem embarrassingly over the top, ridiculous, stupid...pick your adjective.  For a relatively intelligent adult woman, I sure know how to make an ass out of myself.