Today, during a rare attempt to make my own food, I cut my thumb with a cheese knife. Wait, cut is too tame a word, let’s try severed. Yes, I nearly severed the tip of my thumb. A flap of skin reminiscent of the Ecuador gash hung there, blood gushing, as I scrambled from my closet kitchen, down the hall, stumbling over kittens and shoes, to the bathroom sink where cold water brought alternating relief and pain. Luckily my first aid kit was handy with enough gauze and tape for a crude bandage. I immediately gained new appreciation for two hands with opposable thumbs as I struggled to clean and wrap the wound with only my right. This was a textbook moment of my simple incompetence. Sure, everyone cuts their thumb, but if you saw me in my apartment this morning you would swear that I was new to the basic functions of life, as if I just learned how to walk, eat, and dress myself.
Lest you fear that I plan to fill this journal with my failures as a human, I should add that immediately after this debacle I marched over to work and guided a frustrated coworker through a fairly complex text formatting problem with skill and ingenuity.
Thus goes the life of a clumsy design geek.
