An old classic

It is the middle of the first week of spring break (in my part of the world), and my mother has dragged me across the mountains in the hopes that I will use the change in scenery to suddenly be inspired to write several papers in French.  My major exams are the day I return to school after the break, which I consider severely unfair.  Ah well.  I will persevere.  And probably fail my writtens the first time around, but I'm sure that will come up in a later post.

At the moment I am sitting in a study carrel in the most beautiful library I have ever seen.  This public library is gorgeous!  It has a particularly impressive mystery novel collection (I'm sitting nearish that section), and has a lovely view out over the sound, in that I-can-kind-of-see-the-topmasts-of-the-largest-of-the-sailboats sort of way.

But the point of this post is that I am sitting in this beautiful library wearing second-day underwear because, of course, I forgot to pack any for the trip.

Trip to the K-Mart (or the Anacortes equivalent) in the evening, woo!

From the archives

For those of you who don't know me (or have not yet seen me fall down the stairs), I'm going to give you some idea of my background.  Here is an example of one of my more catastrophic Struggles:

In 6th grade I attended the same middle school where my mother worked as a math teacher.  Surprisingly I did not catch as much hell for this as you might think.  Or at least I didn't care, which is probably more likely.  I would work in her classroom in the afternoons once school let out, and I did pretty much whatever she needed (she was my ride home, after all).  One afternoon I was using the paper-cutter, one in that nice slicing-guillotine-arm style, and I was distracted by--of all things--my mother requesting something else of me.  And I sliced off the tip of my left index finger at a diagonal, from the very tip to almost the first knuckle.  I remember not feeling pain until there was blood everywhere and I realized it should be hurting.  And then I was screaming in appropriate Strugglebucket style.

The really fun part of this story is that we couldn't find the bit of finger I'd lopped off, so they put on a big plastic artificial scab to hold my finger together until the skin grew back over the wound.  Once it had healed up, the plastic scab would just fall off like a normal one and POOF finger good as new.  I don't remember how long it took, but fall off it did and then POOF good as new, although my fingernail still grows narrower, which I figure is what happens when you cut off part of your cuticle.  Put my index fingers side-by-side and you'll see the left one really does look like it just had a bit of the corner sliced off.   Also the skin where it healed looks as though the two halves of the wound stretched to meet in the middle rather than growing new skin, so the fingerprint whorls are stretched and warped and meet in a scar line. It's pretty cool, but also pretty distinctive, so it looks like no life of crime for me.

...as if I could keep my cool in any kind of rule-breaking situation.  Strugglebucket Struggles under just normal stress-levels, thank you very much.

Oh wait, I forgot, the really fun part of this story is that two weeks later my mother came and pulled me out of my social studies class, dropped something into my hand and said, "Look what I found!"

Strugglebucket Struggles

The name "Strugglebucket" was given to me by one of my best friends as a somewhat mocking term of endearment.  Very early on in our friendship,  he noticed and was fascinated (and quite frankly amused) by the level of difficulty I have doing the simplest of things.

The phrase I might hear from him most often is "What did you do..."  This is no longer a question, really; its tone very clearly suggests that a more appropriate interpretation might be "I know you did something stupid and I'm coming to you in case it's something worth catching on film."  The fact that he is not with me at the time of this "What did you do..." non-question, and must come looking for me, is also indicative of the fact that I make a lot of startled noises, a lot of the time.  Or crashing noises, depending on the Struggle in question.

I have embraced the moniker, mocking though it may be, because it is also pretty damn accurate.  I spend most of my time just falling up and down stairs and tripping over invisible items and knocking full drinking glasses off tables and getting my hair caught in things (it's really long, okay?), but there have been some pretty epic and catastrophic Struggles in my long and varied career, and no doubt I will only continue taking my Strugglebucketry skills to ever higher echelons of phailure.  I only hope to document some of them here for posterity, in case I ultimately Struggle my way to a horrible accidental death.