Acts of stupidity

Those who know me will agree that I am quite frequently full of tomfoolery. I'm late for engagements, I forget about commitments, I misplace precious belongings, and perpetrate an ever changing assortment of blunders. As much as I've actively and self-consciously pursued higher levels of focus and efficiency, acts of stupidity continue to be my M.O.

For your entertainment, here are some of my recent snafus and idiocies:

-Because I have deficient kitchen counter space, I do not own a microwave. Because I prefer to make my coffee in a French press, I regularly have cold half-pots of coffee sitting around that I'm too poor to allow to go to waste. Because I happen to have an aluminum camping mug from Ecuador, I heat up my coffee in the cup on the stove. It is a recurrent blunder of mine to leave the mug toasting on the stove until and after the coffee starts to boil violently. This truly stupid mistake was once compounded when I outright left my apartment, stove on, coffee cooking away to sludge. Luckily, before I had gone more than four blocks down the street, I ran into my buddy Don Everhart. During our courteous exchange of palaver, I recalled the mug, and ran back to extinguish the burner. By that point, I was appreciably late for class.

-Keys are like little parasites that have you by the balls (or ovaries, depending on the physiology) - you just cannot do without them. Unless, of course, you are willing to be robbed while never being able to access your mail. Despite how often I carry and use my keys, I am strangely little inclined to losing them. Instead, I leave them in the lock of my apartment, on the outside, for any random predator to purloin. This only happened once, but c'mon, for the love of god.

-The other day I ran to "the bean" - the "Cloud Gate" sculpture in Millennium Park, the Loop. Although it might have been 10 degrees out and snowing, that's neither here nor there. The asinine aspect of the trip was that I hadn't bothered to bring either transit card, credit card, or cash. I could have run back, but I wasn't planning on it, plus I was meeting with a friend for lunch (Harold's fried chicken, obviously). Luckily my running companions were more prepared than I was, and they paid for my one-way on the bus.

-In Santiago, Chile, I used to have a habit of getting on the wrong trains, going the wrong directions on the right trains, or missing stops. In Chicago, I've had limited reappearance of this phenomenon, but today I was heading uptown, and I needed to make a transfer. Two stops ahead of time, I galumph out of the train and then peer all about shortsightedly searching for the transfer tunnel. Of course, by the time I realize I'm on the wrong platform, the doors have shut forever, and I'm stuck, in the cold, waiting for 10 minutes. The kicker is that the reason, the sole reason, I was dumb enough to emerge so early was music. I was so getting jiggy with Yin Yang by Jarabe de Palo that I was exited out of over-excitement. Clearly, I'm a buffoon.