Moose in the Kitchen

Smack in the middle of my forehead is a white crescent moon, courtesy of a door handle in Jamaica. We weren’t supposed to be in Jamaica for more than an hour, but apparently an hour isn’t time enough to make it through the labyrinth that calls itself a customs line. Why you need to go through customs just to switch flights is beyond me, but then so is seventh grade math. In fact, it’s amazing the left half of my head isn’t concave. If you go by the SAT scores (and who doesn’t?), my English language skills render me as close to perfect as it’s possible to be. My math skills render me mostly retarded.

Unable to make our flight home, we were ushered into a large Jamaican hotel. One that all but chained the doors. It was possible to get out on foot, but only by walking through a parking lot and climbing over a few barriers. Guests were clearly not encouraged to leave. Wandering through a nearby park, we learned why. We were the only white people. As in, the only white people. Anywhere. We got stares from the older folk and vocal affirmations from the younger. One little boy, twirling around in circles, actually stopped dead when he saw us to shout, “White people! White people!”

Yeah, kid, that’s what they all say. Especially when we hit the dance floor. (Ba dum bum ching!)

Sorry. It’s been a long NaBloPoMo.

I blame the bathroom door handle in our hotel room. It bit me. I was just sitting on the toilet, minding my own business, when THUNK! It jumped out of its cozy little home nestled in the door and took a chunk out of my forehead. As I prefer my forehead unmutilated, I found this irksome. And told the door handle so. But only after screaming bloody murder and withstanding much mockery. Saying, “Hey! That door handle is in a really bad place,” a grand total of two seconds before the THUNK! was just fodder for certain unsympathetic people. Laughter continued to roll until I could prove there was blood. Only then did I get the proper empathy.

Scar number two is a thin raised line on the back of my left hand, about half an inch long. A friend and I made a boat out of a cardboard box and several gallons of shellac in order to go boating in the school swimming pool. Sadly, it was a school sponsored event. Would have been so much cooler if we strolled into the middle of gym class with a cardboard boat and started paddling through the lap swimmers. Instead, we participated in Boat Wars, that truly excellent program that encouraged youths like myself to build flotation devices out of improbable materials, put them in chlorinated water and see how long it takes everyone to sink. (Answer: not long.) I got the scar as we dragged the sodden mess our boat had become out of the pool. Leftover shellac gashed my hand so I would forever remember the triumph of being second to last to sink.

My third scar is a large silvery hunk of flesh on the underside of my left knee. I was at an SAT prep course and we decided to leave. Illicitly, I imagine, as this incident includes climbing over a fence. I’m not sure where we were going or why we couldn’t have just used the gate a mere fifty feet away, but over the fence we went.

Unfortunately for my leg, there was barbed wire on this fence. It caught my leg as I was going over and I barely paused long enough to yank my leg free. I didn’t feel much (I’m of the opinion that part of the reason kids are so stupid is because they don’t feel pain) until I got home. I was wearing black stretch pants (yes, I was – shut up) that disguised all the blood. These pants were clearly the wardrobe equivalent of a first-aid box because they also held in place the huge hunk of flesh I had ripped off. Judging by the mass of silvery scar tissue that remains to this day, it might have been smarter to get that sucker stitched up. But smart people generally don’t clamber over barbed wire fences in the first place, so I just slapped the chunk of flesh back in place, stuck on a band-aid, and sallied forth to continue my hoodlum-esque itinerary.

Wait. I said four scars, didn’t I? I obviously can’t count. Perhaps I should have stuck around that SAT prep course a little longer.

Related posts:

1. Dogus Nervosa
2. Two Large Rumps, One Small Seat
3. There May Even Be Video Evidence
4. Dancing in the Bathroom at Work: Lesson One
5. Another Glimpse into the Pitch-Black Depths of My Laziness