Tag: humiliation

Reversal of Fortune

On By Alicia McCauleyIn The Junk Drawer10 Comments

Yesterday I managed to crack my own Top 5 Most Embarrassing Moments.  And that’s saying something.

I’ve given it some thought, and I can say with assurance that what happened to me yesterday was more embarrassing than cutting myself out of a velvet party dress.

More embarrassing than walking around a cruise ship for a day with a gaping hole in the seat of my pants.

And yes, it was even more embarrassing, albeit less terrifying, than having a bird mistake my hair for a nest.

Yet, is was less embarrassing than accidentally calling the Personnel Director “bitch” while I was inquiring about the possibility of a job.

Yes, I do believe yesterday’s, uh, episode has landed squarely in the #2 spot of Most Embarrassing Moments

It all began in my classroom, which is currently serving as a dragonfly nymph nursery and has a pungent, swampy smell.  I’m sensitive to smells and so when my stomach felt a little unsettled, I chalked it up to the funk and cracked my back door open for a little fresh air.  I felt much better and worked for another hour or so.

After school I stopped by the pet store to pick up some dragonfly supplies.  The smell of pet stores always makes me a little nauseated and so I thought nothing of it when my stomach gurgled.  I quickly paid for my items, declining the plastic bag offered by the clerk, and shoving the items in my purse as I rushed out the door for some air.

I was just coming around to the driver’s side of my car when my stomach dropped and twisted sharply.  I looked around for a nearby trashcan.  Why didn’t I just take that plastic bag?  Before I could hobble over to the trash can, I felt a revolution rising in my stomach.  I gripped my purse with one hand and the side of the car with the other.  Home was only 5 minutes away.  No way am I going to make it.  And no way am I going to puke inside my car.

And I made the decision then and there to let fly in the parking lot.  Or rather my stomach made it for me.  It’s what competitive eaters call a “reversal of fortune”.  And I was reversing all over the parking lot.

A man with a lap dog was on his way into the pet store.  When he saw me, instead of looking the other direction, he started walking toward me.  Chivalry is alive and well.  That’s what ran through my mind while gasping for  breath and wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.  He patted me on the back.  Incidentally the only thing that makes my stomach turn more violently when I’m puking is having someone touch me.  But this stranger was going out of his way to be nice and so I tried to quell the heat churning in my belly.

“Morning sickness is the worst,” the man said, shaking his head.  Wait, what???

“What?” I said gulping air.

“Morning sickness is the worst.  My wife was sick for three months straight.”

Dear reader, let me pause for a moment and catch you up to speed.  I AM NOT PREGNANT.  I have never been pregnant.  In fact I will never be pregnant.  Apparently I look pregnant, which is just about the worst information to find out while blowing chunks for a public audience.

Believe it or not, that’s when things got worse.

I started to cry.

I turned a deep, radish red.  I was SO humiliated.

And continued to puke, narrowly missing his dog.  I should have aimed better.  There I was: a puking, sweating, crying mess in the parking lot.

I stopped heaving for a moment and the man said something like, “I’ll go inside and get you some paper towels.”  Honestly, I’m not entirely sure that’s what he said.

My embarrassment was too loud.

The second he set foot inside the store, I jumped in my car and sped away, leaving a black tire mark next to my other offerings.  Back at home I had an encore performance and topped it all off with one more crying jag.

While recuperating and setting up my post as Couch Captain, I ruminated on a few lessons from this incident.

  1. Listen to my gut.  Especially when it’s making noises that can only be from the pit of hell.
  2. Men, this one is especially for you.  The only time is it ever okay to assume a woman is pregnant is if you are in the same room actually watching her physically give birth.
  3. This last one is more of a practical tidbit for me to keep in mind should I find myself in this situation again.  Aim better.  Aim for the dog.  No, not that one.  The one who somehow managed to add insult to injury by inadvertantly calling me fat.

Here’s hoping you have a weekend full of good fortune, dear reader, and none of it in reverse.

Stuff It: Yet Another Embarrassing Bike Story

On By Alicia McCauleyIn Bike Adventures8 Comments

I am trying desperately, urgently to lose five pounds.  Five evil pounds with their horrid little claws clinging tenaciously to my buttocks.  I have been duking it out with these last five pounds for months.

Months.  Plural.  As in since October.

So there I was in spin class Monday night, ready to throw down with the Flab Five.  I was wearing a shirt and shorts.  Two pairs of shorts, actually.  Nobody in my spin class wears only Spandex shorts and if you’ve ever been the only one in the room in Spandex, you know it’s a less than comfortable feeling.  But I love me some Spandex.  It wicks, not to mention the joy of extra butt padding.  So I ride with double shorts.

Spin class started just fine.  I was killing it.  My legs were speedy quick and I kept cranking up the tension.  I was in the zone.  I am never in the zone.  I could just see skinnier thighs in my future.

And then I felt something funny in my Spandex.

Something lumpy and soft and a teensy bit scratchy.  Something definitely not the slick, slidy polyester goodness of Spandex.

I didn’t know what to do.

There was no way I was getting off my bike and heading to the bathroom to take care of it.  The bathroom is far away and spin class is only 45 minutes long.  I had those last five pounds in my sight and I was not going to miss a single second of spin class.

But there was no way I was reaching down in there in a roomful of people.  Besides who knows what I would have pulled out.  It could have been something as innocuous as a dryer sheet, but knowing my luck, it more likely would have been my most shamefully tattered pair of undies.

So I decided to ignore it, to put my mental game to the test.  I’ve got mental game to spare.  The foreign object was trapped in my Spandex just below my right hip.  I could deal with that.  I’ve ridden with much worse things many a time.

When we stood up to climb, my quads were shredding the hill.  I kept turning the tension knob up higher and higher.  I was owning the zone.

And then the lumpy thing started to inch its way over and down to, uh, um, a more centralized location.

I was already sweating buckets, but I could feel my face flush even deeper.  As I hammered away on the bike, I whispered a prayer of thanks for having pulled on double shorts.  I loosened up the drawstring on the outer pair to disguise the monkey business that was happening in my nether regions.  I fidgeted to try to get the thing to move back over to a less uncomfortable area.  No dice.  Instead it relocated further South.

I looked down and there was a giant bulge where no woman should have a bulge.  If it were possible to die of embarrassment, I’m sure I would have keeled over on the spot.

Several times I nearly worked up the nerve to reach in and pull out whatever it was that was ailing me.  But the thing about spin class is there really isn’t anywhere to put stuff.  I didn’t have a bag or a purse I could nonchalantly drop said object into.  Even if I’d gone on a rescue mission, I would’ve then had to stop pedaling, unclip from my bike and walk to the trash can in the front of the room to deposit whatever treasure I retrieved from the recesses of my shorts.

Absolutely.  No.  Way.

So for the remainder of the class, I tried not to fidget, lest things shift into a more precarious position.  I tell you, never in my life had spin class felt so long.  Whatever was down there had gone from mildly scratchy to just this side of sandpaper.

When the class was over and I was back in the privacy of my own home, I peeled off my shorts and there crumpled up in a sweaty wad was a sock that had been missing since laundry day.

Yep, I’d stuffed my shorts for spin class.

I feel like there are some jokes ripe for the picking here.  Something about sock monkeys or ‘socking it to you’ or something along those lines, but the truth is on Monday night I gained an iota of respect for anyone who can walk around for more than five minutes with a sock in their pants.  My hat is off to them.

Apparently my socks are, too.