KARMA?

It has been brought to my attention that perhaps the reason that I suffered this devastating injury (see last entry), has something to do with the fact that I foolishly chose to insult The Deaf Community in a recent blog.
Some would say that I only got what I deserved.
That I had, in fact, messed with The Bull.
And we all know what happens when you do that.

I will not whine about my ankle in my blog.
That would be too easy and extremely uninteresting to you folks. I realize that.
Still, it's important to note that I have discovered the single hardest thing about not being able to walk without crutches, that thing being:

Transportation of liquids.

A glass of water, a cereal bowl, hydrochloric acid, all of these things must be balanced carefully when being moved, and balance isn't exactly my forte right now.

To be honest, I'm actually starting to wonder what exactly my forte is.

It's obviously not basketball, even before I was injured, I was still indelibly white.
I can't say that it's video games, I enjoy them, but I'm not even in the same league as most 5th grade boys.
I'm very good at just lying around on the floor, but tragically, I'm playing second fiddle in my own group with that one.
I do like to write, and I have won every Bloggie ever awarded, but I think Jeffrey "Thomas" Schell has me beat with his perpetual ranting about fine dining servers and Man-o-meters.

Oh, how silly of me, I know what my forte is.

It's my knowledge of utterly useless facts.

Strangely enough, that hasn't helped me very much throughout my journeys in life.

There was one time though.
One time in my life that this talent of mine could come shining through, and I could use it to light my darkest hour.

But then it didn't. Let me explain.

My senior year in high school I was: Drama Club President (impeached), a Varsity Soccer Player (benched), the School Mascot (Splash, the friendly killer whale), Copy Editor of the school newspaper (The Natsilane), and Captain of the Hi-Q team.

What the hell is Hi-Q, you ask? I asked the same thing, and here's what they told me. (If you already know, feel free to skip this next paragraph, it won't be funny at all.)

A kind of aptitude test is given to the entire student body, and the top nine scores are taken to field the school's representative team in the Hi-Q tournament. It is like an academic competition that lets different schools compete against each other by answering questions for points. The questions range from history to physics to literature, and each team has four chances to answer each question before the question is given to another team. Got It?

So here's what happened;
It was the last match of the year and we were up against our arch-rivals, Everett, and Cascade. Luckily, it was a home game and we were in our own gym and surrounded by everyone who couldn't sneak out of school before the assembly started. My mom was even there.

I was the spokesperson for our squad of four, and therefore it was my responsibility
to poll my peers and give the best answer possible for the first three tries, and then pull something out of my ass for the last attempt. It was a good system, and I had fun with it.

Then the question came.

It was a question about an Italian artist, and it was so complex that I won't even attempt to recreate it here, lest this blog become even more staggeringly boring.

Needless to say, my crack team of experts couldn't even come up with one answer, let alone three. So, it was up to me.
I racked my brain for names of Italian artists and just blurted out the first name that came to me.
"Michelangelo?" I asked/answered.
"No, that is incorrect." The judge said.
I scrambled for another name. And surprisingly, I found one.
"Raphael."
"No, incorrect."

At this point a plan began to formulate in my head. If I couldn't get the answer right, I'd at least have a little fun being a dumbass.

"Leonardo Da Vinci." I proudly proclaimed.
"No." The man said.

By now, some of my classmates at the assembly had begun to perk up. They understood what I was doing, but none of the teachers or administrators had any clue. The entire student body began to murmur to each other all at once.
That moment in time was slowed down to a crawl in my mind, and I remember looking over to where my mother was sitting in the audience. She had a pained expression on her face. At first I didn't know why, but then I realized, she thought I was looking to her for support because I didn't know the answer to the question.

But this was bigger than the question.

It was bigger than me.

It was bigger than the whole Kimberly Clarke Scott Hi-Q Team competition.

It was a chance for me to make the greatest inside joke in history, and the level of tension had begun to rise. The murmuring built to a crescendo, and finally the narrator put up his hands and asked the crowd for quiet. They gave it to him.

Absolute silence, in fact.

He turned from them and looked at me and told me that it was time. What was my last response going to be?

I felt the wave of anticipation swell in that gymnasium, and I rode it to it's peak before uttering the four syllables that transformed the rest of my senior year into one long day at Disneyland, only with no lines. I licked my lips, cleared my throat, bent forward towards the microphone, and said it.

"Donatello."

The roar from the crowd was enormous and instantaneous. As soon as the "O" had left my lips, people had begun cheering, and the sheer volume of their happiness was overwhelming.
And as strong as that tide of jubilation had been, it was nothing compared to the tidal wave of joy that was unleashed upon us all, when the narrator looked at me and said,

"That, is correct."