I was thinking about all the different ways at different times that I had embarassed myself, or was just self conscious of at the moment, and also when I had seen others do it to themselves. I'll give 2 examples of how we torture/delight ourselves and each other with our "faux pas" or "meprise"?,(mistakes and misunderstandings? heh. bad french)
for now, and see if anyone wants to play. Give a general or a specific instance, your own or one you saw happen to someone else.
Letting the *ahem* "air bubble" out of my shorts in the pool/jacuzzi.
even if it is just trapped air, tell me people don't look?
Holding a carton of milk in my hand, I went to adjust my sleeve by raising my arm above my head, and twisting my wrist, so I could look at my watch, which was on the same hand that I was holding the milk. Needless to say, I poured milk on my own head in front of the entire cafeteria.
i seem to be unable to round a corner in a building without whackin myself on the arm...i bonk my head alot! (talk about getting some looks!)
and once, as i was crossing a busy intersection, i saw a blind man coming toward me with his white stick just whackin away from side to side, i SAW him coming!! and i KNEW as soon as i saw him there was a distinct possiblity that that white stick could trip me, and sure enough, as i passed him and tried to scoot out of the way, that white stick went right between my feet and BOOM! down she goes in the middle of the intersection, in the middle of traffic, during rush hour in the financial district.
this is only ONE of MANY ways i constantly embarass myself!
the utter inability to remember anyone my wife has ever introduced me to. be it distant relations or workmates from city hall. and people she went to school with. i stand there mutely waiting for intro that never comes.
Last winter, I was making deliveries down a quiet residential street.
I noticed a pretty cute college girl walking around, I'm pretty sure should caught me gawking at her.
At my next stop, she was walking right down the sidewalk, beside the truck...trying to look burly, I hefted the parcel up on my shoulder, and proceded to jog up the steps to the front door, slipped on the ice on the top step, and fell down the stairs...the parcel went flying; the girl could not stop laughing; I had trouble walking for a couple of days.
Last edited by drew on Tue Oct 18, 2005 5:18 am, edited 1 time in total.
I thought you were a ripe grape
a cabernet sauvignon
a bottle in the cellar
the kind you keep for a really long time
and then there was the time i jumped a light at a busy intersection at the same time a taxi was coming thru the intersection, he snagged my handlebar and it threw me into the middle of the intersection. what do i do? i hop up shouting "my fault my fault, i'm okay i'm okay"
crisis management.
or the time i bonked my head getting my handbag out of the Supershuttle and the driver felt compelled to give me a neurological exam with a tiny little flashlight, checking my PUPIL reaction or something. sheesh.
you're more advanced than a cockroach,
have you ever tried explaining yourself
to one of them?
~ alan bates, the mothman prophecies
i've had this with actors before, on the set,
where they get upset about the [size of my]
trailer, and i'm always like...take my trailer,
cause... i'm from Kentucky
and that's not what we brag about.
~ george clooney, inside the actor's studio
a straight edge for legends at
the fold - searching for our
lost cities of gold. burnt tar,
gravel pits. sixteen gears switch.
Haphazard Lucy strolls by.
~ dennis r wood ~
i was out running in the middle of the day and happened to be passing alongside a school playing field in the middle of their lunch hour. picking my speed up to try and look really intense and somehow cool(?)in front of the kids i failed to see,the not inconsiderable ditch before me. athletically, i leaped the ditch, just, but lost my balance on landing. with my torso no more than 6 inches off the ground i somehow managed to reamain in forward motion for, what must have been, another 10 metres, until i came to a shuddering halt against the trunk of a rather large tree. all this with the eyes of about 50 teenagers fixed on me.
i wish i'd just fallen in to the ditch.
It'd take you a long time to blow up or shoot all the sheep in this country, but one diseased banana...could kill 'em all.
no one saw it but. riding home from work late at night on my bicycle. cruising down the hill at a high rate of speed, i hit the sewer drain and go flying off my bike. over the handlebars and down the road. landing roughly, lucky to not have broken anything.
I once had an "Along Came Polly" moment after a date fifteen years ago.
I got very sick off the food I had eaten for dinner, and upon returning to her place for a romantic evening, I proceeded to completely gross her out with all of the trumpeting and groaning sounds I was making in her very echoey bathroom... then the toilet wouldn't flush...
Needless to say I never saw her again after that date. That memory STILL makes me squirm and grin in embarrassment even to this day!!
"This is the grace that has been given to you - to bear what must be borne."
Well, there's funny embarrassing.....like living in south France for 3 months before someone pointed out that about 50% of the time I made casual conversational references to old girlfriends that I was accidentally using the wrong article, giving the impression (perhaps because of my apparent gift for speaking French that at least sounds fluent) that I was either gay or bi. I spent the remaining 3 months of my internship being the butt of (admittedly funny) bisexual jokes.
...and then just plain embarrassing - as a senior in High School, and lead trumpet player in the band, I was asked to solo the National Anthem to kickoff a big school meet. So, I coolly stepped out to the front of the 50-yard line, about-faced, and proceeded to give the most anemic, note-missing, stage-frightened raspy mouth-fart of a trumpet solo that I ever played in my whole life. Great tribute to the country, there, Slick.
I was a teenager, riding my bike to school. I was at a very busy four way intersection. It was close to the school, so most of the traffic consisted of the cool kids who had cars (a most majestic group, of which I had no hope of being a part of). Madonna's Like a Virgin was booming on someone's stereo (okay, if that doesn't date me, I don't know what would ). I start to ride my bike across the intersection, and something happens and my bike flips right in the middle of it. I eat pavement; scratched palms, hole in my jeans......I thought I couldn't have been more embarrassed, but I was when I realized that I had bent the wheel of my bike and I had to CARRY it (limping of course) not just across the rest of the intersection, but all the way to school. I was laughed at by everyone.
It really would have been easier to take if I could have gotten back on the bike and cruised out of there really fast.
A couple of weeks ago while delivering to an office building right on the waterfront, a gust of wind came up and slammed the truck door on my head, knocked me flat on my butt. I had nothing to stop the bleeding (which was a lot) except the shirt I was wearing, so I had to go into a couple of offices with my shirt wrapped around by bleeding head.
Then last week, in the same parking lot, a gust of wind came up, and blew all my paperwork out of my clipboard; and all over the parking lot; didn't hurt as much as the head wound, but probebly more embaracing.
I thought you were a ripe grape
a cabernet sauvignon
a bottle in the cellar
the kind you keep for a really long time
There was a dumpster on fire beside a major road.
Firetrucks and police cars were on scene and traffic was slowed to a crawl from the rubber-neckers.
The lane closest to the dumpster was blocked by a police car,
with lights flashing and an officer standing in the closed lane directing traffic to the other two lanes.
I was behind an elderly woman (O.K., she was OLD!)
and she was too busy being nosey, driving with her head turned to stare at the flaming dumpster.
I stopped to wait for a break in the lane next to me so I can move over an continue on my merry way.
And of course, the woman in front of me wasn't paying any attention to nothing except the fire
and proceeded to run right into the back of the police car.
I almost fell out of my vehicle from laughing so hard at her,
but the cop that had to jump out of her way didn't think that it was so funny.
Neither did the woman.
Luckily, traffic was only going about 10 MPH.
Have you hugged your arghule today?
________________________________________
"For millions of years
mankind lived just like the animals.
Then something happened
that unleashed the power of our imagination -
we learned to talk."
________________________________________
If PRO and CON are opposites,
then the opposite of PROgress must be...
_______________________________________
We were doing a play in the theatre at school. We performed in front of hundreds of parents. One of my mates was a janitor, and he mopped the floor with a slightly damp mop. When he was shouting and walking angerily across the stage, he... slipped. Right onto his ass. And three women and me who were in the play just burst into laughter. So did the audience. And after that the whole mood of the play was just broken. We tried to keep it up, but the two of the women just broke into random laughter and the rest of us joined in.
At the World Cup in France (Soccer - 1998), I'd been drinking , heavily , for 3 weeks, and had arranged to meet a young lady (now my wife) I had met on my first day in Paris.
She was working during the day, so I thought I'd do a little window shopping to pass the time, so I pop into Galleries lafayette, which is one of the more prestigious shopping centres in Paris.
Of course I'm wearing a kilt (no underwear), and as I'm wandering through the shopping centre, I feel an irresistable urge to fart. (remember, I'd been drinking for 3 weeks solid) However, when I let one rip, it's not methane that's released, and as I look down, there is a small steaming runny turd on the floor. Luckily, none of it hits me or my kilt, and I walk off into the distance and find the nearest toilet to ensure there's no residue clinging on (if you know what I mean).
That in itself wasn't that embarrasing, as no one saw what happened (I hope), but when my wife found out about it a few years later,that was embarasing, and when she told her parents about it that was even more embarassing.
On the slim chance that the cleaner who cleaned that up is reading this, please accept my unreserved apology.
