Project Hindsight has been on my mind for a while and I'm really excited to finally get going. Not excited in the "oh look, a 20% coupon from Bed, Bath and Beyond" way, but rather the kind of excited that harkens back to being a kid the night before the first day of school. My backpack is packed, clothes are set out and I'm worried about whether or not people are going to like me and whether I will be smart and witty enough to hack it. Will I make friends? Will the other kids be mean to me? Will I discover a subject that I love?
This blog is about sharing with others so we can all dip into the collective experience pool and take the things that will help us on our journey. Sometimes we need a sympathetic ear or a hard kick in the ass, but more often than not, I need humor. A good laugh truly is fantastic medicine. Since it's just me here now and no one has subscribed as of yet, I'd like to kick things off with a true story with a very important moral that serves me to this day.
The year was 1986 and it was the first day of first grade. It was September in the Mojave Desert but for some reason I insisted on wearing a sweatshirt to school. I was a very unreasonable child and nothing my mother said could convince me otherwise, even though she tried over and over to tell me that I would be way too hot. It was powder blue with little flowers or animals or something all over it and I just had to make my debut in this shirt. Sometime around lunch I was sitting at my desk (we ate lunch in our classroom for some bizarre reason) and I began to get unbearably hot. Without thinking, I pulled my sweatshirt over my head. It was in the moment when my face was stuck somewhere in the depths of my shirt and my arms were over my head, trapped in their respective sleeves, that I realized that I did not have anything on under that stupid sweatshirt. Unfortunately, I realized this about an eighth of a second before the rest of the class did and my arms were hopelessly trapped and there was no hope for a quick recovery. I wrangled myself back into my shirt and stared, humiliated, at my desk for the rest of the day. The rest of the afternoon was a blur and when my mom asked me how my day was, I mumbled that it was fine and omitted the fact that I spent at least ten never-ending seconds topless amongst my peers. I'm not certain how I disposed of it, but I never saw that shirt again.
Moral of the story: Listening to the advice of someone wiser than you will help ensure that no one ever says, "hey, there's that girl who took her clothes off in class" as you walk by.
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