Terminal Flakiness

This morning, shortly after waking up, my eyes started to itch. My allergies always act up when they mow the lawn around here. I decided to head them off at the pass by putting in some eye drops. I went to my bathroom, grabbed a bottle and just as the drop was about to slide out in the tube and into my eye, I realized something. Dr. Scholls doesn’t make eye drops.

This morning, I came a hair’s breadth away from dumping wart remover in my eye.

I consider myself a relatively intelligent individual. My mind is a wasteland of facts and information. When I’m writing an article, I rarely have to do research, because the information is already in my head. But I also suffer from a serious illness.

It’s called terminal flakiness.

Generally, I’m ok when it comes to complex thinking. It’s the simple everyday tasks that usually end in disaster. It isn’t the first time I’ve done something stupid out of straight up flakiness. In fact, it’s actually pretty common. To prove my point, I present the following exhibits.

Exhibit A: I’ve gotten back together with the wrong guy. By wrong guy, I don’t mean he was bad for me or he was a jerk. By wrong guy, I mean he was the wrong individual entirely. During the time period, I had dated a guy named David and I had dated a guy named Daniel relatively close to each other. When David called me wanting to give it another shot, I agreed to meet him for a drink. Imagine my surprise when I showed up for our first reconciliation date and was confronted with a 5’7 white guy instead of the 6’4 Hispanic guy I was expecting. It never even occurred to me to question why ‘David’ had suddenly lost his Spanish accent when we were talking on the phone.

Exhibit B: I’ve flooded every kitchen and every bathroom of every apartment I have lived in at least one time. For some reason, right as the tap turns on, my mind shuts down. I usually don’t realize what I’ve done until I’m wondering why there is 2 inches of water on my floor.

Exhibit C: I’ve screwed up boiling water. One night, I decided to make myself some raman noodles. I was standing over the pot for a good twenty minutes, wondering why the hell the water wasn’t boiling. I finally realized that the water wasn’t boiling because I had failed to put any water in the pot.

Exhibit D: I frequently forget how old I am and on several occasions, have actually told people the wrong age. It would make sense if I was making myself sound younger than I am, but oftentimes, I actually give a number that makes me older. I can’t really blame myself though. This number changes once a damn year for gods sake. How is anyone expected to keep that straight?

Exhibit E: My email inbox is filled with ‘password reset’ emails. There are very few sites that I can get into on the first try. In almost every situation, I forget my password and have to reset. The sad part is, I use the same password, or some variation, for every single site.

Exhibit F: I have left my house, on at least 10 different occasions, with my shirt on both backwards and inside out. In some cases, it wasn’t completely unreasonable. Like when I did it wearing a t-shirt. But one time, it was a sweater…with buttons. I still have no idea how I managed to do that.

I blame my terminal flakiness on circuit overload. You know how when you plug too many things into an outlet, the circuit overloads and the lights go out? I think that happens with my head. I try to cram info in for work, and I lose the ability to manage my day to day life without doing something stupid, like dropping a corrosive chemical into my eye.

Also, I call it ‘terminal’ flakiness because it’s almost 100% guaranteed to get me killed some day.