I don’t have alot of embarassing moments-mostly because, in yet another trait I get from my fahter, I’m not usually self-aware enough to be embarassed when I should. For example, I should have been embarassed when I wore a white shirt and khaki pants every day for at least six weeks in middle school, but I didn’t think it was weird at all. I was slightly embarassed when I accidentally snot bubbled while talking to that one girl who was a model (literally- she was in the JC Penny catalog).
One of my best, most embarassing moments took place on a brisk, fall day in College Station during my freshman year in college. I don’t normally take pride in my clothes, but this particular day, I was sporting a cardigan, cool jeans, and a really cool, long scarf wrapped around my neck in a very trendy, hipster way.
I was trekking across campus, probably on the way to Spanish, enjoying the weather and feeling like a really classy college student. I was really digging the changing leaves and the cool breeze on my face when all of a sudden….a balled up sock suddenly appeared in the crotch of my jeans. I mean, it felt like I had accidentally left a sock in my jeans and it chose this, the coolest of all my college moments, to suddenly appear between my legs inside my jeans.
No worries, I thought. Maybe it’s a fluke. I’ll just keep walking and it will go away.
Guess what. It didn’t go away. It got bigger and bigger. I thought it might be slightly embarassing to stop walking and stare at my own crotch or try to clear the thing until I could get to the privacy of a bathroom so I just kept on walking.
Finally, it had to stop. If I kept on going, I was going to roll into my Spanish class on a gianormous sock ball that had lodged itself in my jeans, like an acid trip James and the Giant Peach . So I stopped and looked down.
Let’s imagine for a second that you are one of the normal A&M students who is just walking innocently to class. All of a sudden, the crowd parts and you see this:
Horrifying, right? For you AND me.
Now, if I had corrected this little problem when it began, it wouldn’t have been embarassing. But I didn’t. Nope, not me.
Instead, I walked a quarter mile across campus, between classes, with thousands of other cool A&M students, with a scarf wedged between my legs like some weird winter bathing suit that I like to wear over my clothes.
Then, I kind of blacked out from the embarassment and ran to class with a bag over my head.
To be honest, I’m kind of surprised it didn’t make the school newspaper- “Freshman Girl Traverses Campus with Scarf Wedged Between Legs and Instantly Loses All Hope of Finding Boyfriend”. I guess I should be happy that it didn’t happen in the age of Twitter or I would have ended up on one of those Wal-Mart people websites in ten seconds flat.
At this point, I could launch into a lengthy discussion of how God always takes me down a notch when my head gets too big….because He does. I mean, you know that old saying “Pride cometh before that scarf gets wedged between your legs and you walk across campus in front of a million people like a freak.” (Okay, maybe most people are quoting Proverbs 16:18- “Pride goes before destruction, And a haughty (prideful) spirit before stumbling.”)
God is good at helping me remember who I really am (a little peon)and reminding me who I am not (Queen of the Universe). Sometimes the humbling process is painful and sometimes it is humorous. Either way, the end result is the same- remembering that God is God and I am not.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
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