Oops I did it again, again…

Let’s talk about public bloopers… Total, hair raising, absolute, community-witnessed embarrassment. We all have those nightmares don’t we of being well and truly and totally mortified in front of a crowd. (And kindly leave Janet Jackson out of this – she did it on purpose as you all know)
Well, dear gentle readers, ever since I can remember my nightmares normally come true…
Perhaps it was the encaged extrovert exhibitionist hiding in me: I remember trying to sing when I was about 12, the song was the Carpenters’ one which begins “Such a feelings coming over me…” Well, I was just into the first line when my voice choked up and refused to work – in front of a class of 40 7th graders and the resulting silence was astounding, but nothing compared to the following sniggers and snorts- children, precious darlings, are very honest and open about their unfeeling and un empathetic opinions about other children– so that was effectively the cruel abrupt end to my career in song.

Unfortunately for you, dear friends, I bounced back. Resilience is another characteristic of 12 year olds. But years of undaunted, shameless, liberated exhibitionism later I continue to get myself into potentially humiliating situations which would crush a lesser mortal and freeze her in sheer paralytic agonies of discomfiture. Imagine falling off your motorbike in front of Nalanda collage(at school opening time). …been there, done that. Imagine accidentally scratching the paint off your best office buddy’s brand new Primera, and then being stupidly honest enough to owe up to it … Imagine gesticulating absentmindedly sideways at a totally blank whiteboard while lecturing to first year Econ students. They start blinking lugubriously like in Southpark, slowly and seriously. Almost as bad as being ragged into shouting out the name and description of your favorite Family Planning device in the middle of a crowded Colombo pharmacy?(“no, no please not the one with studs-the plain one-!) and imagine if you will, organizing a surprise office staff birthday party and forgetting to drag in the person whose birthday it is…ouch, now that’s got to make you wince, for years …Can people DO this, you wonder? Relax, folks-and remember to keep Al as a benchmark, set against which any of you normal folks can Feel Good about your selves and say –“Well, at least I haven’t XYZ. .like al did in 1996…”
How can she keep doing it, surviving the sheer mortification time after time, you wonder?
It’s the bigger picture, you see. The average human attention span being approximately 3 seconds, and what with larger issues such as the ozone layer, Ruwandan genocide and whether mobile phones make you impotent, being higher on peoples’ worry lists, the truth of the matter is that it’s really difficult to make a lasting impression on anyone anyway. Ie: no one actually gives a flying f***.
To be honest, in spite of the fact that the human population is swarming, people have never been lonelier or more self centered than the present age! We are all over the place and yet people are constantly dying alone, frozen solid in front of their televisions with a boring supermarket dinners on their laps! So if you are as embroiled in today’s rat race as you claim to be, the chances are that whatever foot in mouth situation made me wince yesterday will be generally forgotten by next Friday and definitely out of public recollection by this time next month- so I take heart!
And if it isn’t, well, look on the bright side: I actually scored and will be the filler subject during those awkward pauses in pre dinner conversations when a circle of drunken people are groping desperately for something to talk and choke about!
Now that’s what you call win-win. ..