I walked into my house the other day to find two friends sprawled on the couch. "Come sit down with us," they said. So I did. And as I leaned against my friend's leg and asked if she had a good day, I tried to give her arm a little poke (I'm not sure why -- it seemed like the right action to accompany the question). But instead of touching her arm, I jabbed her directly in the nipple. I poked my friend in the nipple. I was hating it. She was hating it. No one was not hating it. Naturally, it's a pretty weird thing to do, jabbing one of your friends in the nipple while asking about her day.
There is no doubt that I am stupid, the Queen of Stupid. So stupid in fact that not only did I inadvertently poke a nipple, but the finger I used was, at the time, swelled to about three times its normal size. Perhaps that's why my aim was so far off, because in my pseudo-athletic failure of a term, I managed to destroy my hands.
I did this after scoring my first six-point shot (due to the absurdly sexist intramural rules) in a basketball game last week. After making the beautiful, tear-prompting, awe-inspiring, nothing-but-net six-pointer, I promptly jammed both of my index fingers and had to remove myself from the game and bench myself for the rest of the regular season.
I am an idiot. I was a bigger idiot in my Drawing One class last week. That's when I decided to stand on a little brick while we drew, in order to help me reach the far end of my paper. The other students didn't know I was on the brick, didn't expect any commotion as we stood around drawing tapestries in peaceful silence.
They didn't know how good I am at being stupid until my brick slipped and I flipped over backwards, sending a Diet Coke across the room, throwing my desk into another guy's desk, spilling charcoal all over my area and banging my head on the floor. Then I did the same thing again a half-hour later. That's when my professor took away the brick and the other kids in the class gave each other that knowing look about the weirdo who fell over twice while standing.
But my best moments occur when dealing with police officers. It's my secret, "stupid girl" talent. After the drawing class that left me mildly concussed, my locked car decided to reject its key while parked in the back of the Hop. I couldn't open the door, had three car-savvy men look at it, and finally called the Hanover Police to help me out. First, the cop asked me (stupid girl) if I was sure it was my car. Yes, I was sure. Then, he called back up (apparently stupid girls are hard to deal with). The two of them spent a full hour (while I held a giant flashlight, even though it was freezing and I had no mittens) digging around in my car doors and not getting them opened.
One of them mentioned "getting the brick," as a way to bust in less elegantly. And the other mentioned his gun. "Be cool," I thought. "Be cool." (This is an important mantra for all stupid people, especially those who are perpetually uncool and stupidly wound up.) Not knowing what else to say, I let out with, "I dare you. I dare you to shoot my car." The cops just looked at me and laughed, understood my stupid affliction, packed up their tools and took me home. The operation had ended, leaving me car-less and defeated.
The next day, after telling this ridiculous story (which sadly doesn't tell very well and has caused me to embarrass myself a few times), I said to a friend, "You know, I kind of like the police. They're sort of fun."
"Silence yourself," she said. "Bite your tongue. Poke a nipple."
Ah yes, I needed that reminder to make me stop, to not do or say anything else, as my friends were already disgusted. But sometimes I need to talk about it, or even write about it and make people laugh at me. It lessens the embarrassment. Right? Indeed, selfish I am in this cathartic self-deprecatory confessional. But I am still figuring things out, trying to learn from the comic greats, the masters who can make stupidity an art form, who can make stupid smart.
For a while, we had our beloved Badly Drawn Girl as such an example. Now, of course, we just mourn her absence, stupidly and unfunnily. Personally, I had been counting on columnist Jourdan Abel '03 to fill in for the badly drawn hero and guide us through the rest of these complicated college days. But who's not perplexed by her mysterious absence from these pages? (Please join me in blitzing The Dartmouth to demand Jourdan's words of stupidly smart wisdom, and maybe even demand she start a comic strip, which would of course finally restore joy to The D-reading campus.)
For without these comic masters, I fear we'll be left with just a bunch of stupid people saying and writing stupid things. Like me. I'm just a stupid girl, spraining fingers, falling over, shooting cars, poking nipples and being stupid.
