Monday, September 24, 2012

warrior, i am not.



{the family wash & their famous vegetarian shepard's pie}


i really hate ice-breaker prompts. when someone says "tell me a little bit about yourself," my mind instantly goes blank.  would you like me to tell you what i was musing about over my morning cereal? because that would probably take an hour.  would you like me to tell you all of my accomplishments, from the time i was conceived to where i'm standing right now? because that would probably take a little longer.

the second worst one is "tell me an interesting fact!" not only are you supposed to open your undying soul to a room of strangers, but you are supposed to choose ONE single, solitary fact that you deem interesting.  and unless you're the first black president or led the nationalist movement in india, it's hard to justify what is "interesting" or not. obama and ghandi are pretty hard to live up to.

one of the worst prompts EVER, right after the ones i just described, is "describe your most embarrassing moment." if you're like me, or the rest of the human population, you may hem and haw for a few moments, staring intently at your feet as if you have just grown a sixth toe.  you may awkwardly giggle and mumble to yourself "haha, embarrassing moment!", thinking that that very moment might as well be it.  right up there with falling on your face as you walk across the graduation stage, or realizing that you're not wearing pants in times square (if any or both of those things have occurred to you, a) i applaud you and b) just humor me here).

i'm pretty positive one of the most embarrassing moments of my life occurred on saturday.  two of my roommates and i decided to run the warrior dash, a 3.1 mile run full of obstacles worthy of gerard butler in the movie "300" (okay, so that's what i felt like, not exactly what i looked like. also, we walked about 2.5 miles. but this is my blog so i'm strong and now have a 6-pack).  the last obstacle consisted of crawling through a deep pool of thick, orange mud.  appealing to my dumb, competitive nature, i decided that it would be a good idea to turn around and attempt to throw mud at my roommates.  two seconds later, my ponytail gets caught in the barbed wire above my head, and i'm sitting there thrashing in the mud as an audience of fellow warrior-dashers looks on.

needless to say, i now have an embarrassing story.

p.s. something i thought was super cool: an organization at the warrior dash collected everyone's ridiculously muddy shoes to donate after the run.  a (literal) bright spot among the mud, sweat, and beer.

"it is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default." 
- j.k. rowling

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