Embarrassment

Embarrassing Moments of My Life

Sometimes you just have to laugh at yourself

Photo by Ivan Aleksic on Unsplash

I think I should get the most embarrassing thing out of the way first. This is something that has never embarrassed me in front of other people, but it makes me laugh at myself internally. It comes from when I was very young and my mother toilet trained me. Of course, I remember very little from that time, but some of her encouraging words stuck with me, even to this day.

So, when I feel a certain urge, I say to myself, “Let’s do a tony-poop”.

Yeah, that. You can stop laughing now.

It weighs what?

I was a precocious and omnivorous reader. My parents had shelf after shelf of books, mostly adult. I devoured them. I seldom bothered with a dictionary; the volume of content consumed let me pick up meaning and nuance from context.

This sometimes meant that I didn’t fully understand a word; more often it meant that I couldn’t pronounce it correctly. For example, if I read “misled”, my brain heard “misselled”.

One day my father asked me how much something weighed. I cheerfully told him that it weighed four libs.

I knew that “lb” meant “pound”, and how the hell else would you pronounce it? I…