Down a Peg

Let's talk a little bit about embarrassment. Now normally you would think that, in order to be embarrassed, you would need to do something embarrassing in front of other people to feel like a true dipshit. If you trip. And people are watching. And you know this. Bam! A little nugget of embarrassment wells up within you and quickly snowballs into you wanting to throw up. You try not to though since that would be embarrassing and you're already using your one broken paddle to navigate shit creek.

So then, it stands to reason that it would be impossible to become embarrassed when you are alone and you do something dumb, right? I discovered a few months back that this is not the case. I was in New Mexico and staying at a friend's apartment. A married couple actually. We had to get up early so they could get me to the airport for a flight scheduled for a quarter to fucking early. Anyway, so I wake up and I'm groggy. That's pretty standard for most. I can generally navigate my way through physical space when I'm tired, even in a place I've never explored before.

Well I head to the shower and disrobe like a normal person (by that I mean I rip my pajama bottoms off like an NBA all star), and I fire up the shower. I notice it's a pretty powerful beam of water and it's just tagging the back wall. Now, I don't know how often you've taken a shower in a place you're generally unfamiliar with, but you always have to plan out your method of attack in order to get in there. If the stream isn't very powerful, you sneak around the back so you can take your time getting used to the temperature. If the water pressure it too high though, you've got to sneak through the front and duck down like some kind of butt ass naked ninja and hope that the water's just right.

Well I don't remember why, but even though the water pressure was nailing the back wall, I remember thinking that the only way to get in there was to go through the back. I had to do it quickly though because the longer it took me, the more water would end up on the floor, which I hate. Well, in my retarded non ninja like quickness I failed to notice that they had a shower mat, I think probably because it was the size of a playing card. So I plant my foot in the shower back and at an angle. Dumb. In an act of defiance, it shot out from under me like I was on fucking roller skates. I proceed to karate kick the mat out from under me and in my still-waking-up haze, I thought it was a squid or something that was touching my foot (stupid little suction cups). I also manage to simultaneously hit my knee on their toilet, ram my elbow into the wall, nearly rack myself on the edge of the bathtub, and pull down part of the shower curtain.

There is no possible situation in life that will embarrass you more when you're by yourself than falling down naked in the shower. Picture that scene from Tommy Boy with the deer tearing the car apart. Okay, now couple that with the scene from Ace Ventura 2 when he's coming out of the rhino's ass. That's what I imagine I looked and sounded like. Just terrible.

So I'm trying to fix everything as fast as possible while water is still shooting out like I popped open a fire hydrant, and I'm thinking that it can't get much more embarrassing. And then I thought "How did they not hear all that?" And then I remember thinking "Oh shit. Please oh please oh please don't let them have heard that." Silence. ...And then the last possible phrase you want to hear in that situation. "Is everything okay in there?" Ugh. What do you say to that? "Yeah, I'm good. As good as a person can be who just racked himself on your bathtub." No! You lie. You lie your ass off. "I'm good. The shampoo just fell." Yeah, your 200 pound bottle of shampoo just fell and managed to somehow tear your shower curtain down. You guys should stop buying shampoo from Costco.

The strange thing is that I'm not nearly as embarrassed telling any of you people about this after the fact as I was when it happened. So, please, learn from my experiences. If you're ever in a new bathroom, showering for the first time, and you see a bath mat, it's there for a reason.

And so that's just one way you can bring yourself down a peg ...almost literally.