I'm Good at Dealing With the Consequences of Being an Idiot

I don't know whether I am the most practically disfunctional person alive or simply a creative problem solver.  Can you be considered a creative problem solver when most of the problems are caused by an apparent inability to function like a normal adult?


Half the rooms in my apartment don't have their own source of light because I have proved incapable of changing the necessary lightbulbs.  On the other hand the skilful deployment of table lamps and miniature spotlights means the lack of lightbulbs isn't really a concern.  Of course the lightbulbs in the lamps burn out as well.  My solution to that so far has been to acquire more lamps.  My home is like the portable lighting equivalent of an elephant's graveyard.


The latest evidence of my combination of genius and incompetence came as a result of activities on the football field (for the record the activity was football so don't look at me suspiciously).  I have developed a habit of suffering painful but ultimately trivial injuries while stumbling about lathered in sweat chasing a ball that everybody else is better at kicking that me.  Yesterday the trivial injury de jour was a stomped on toe.  There was blood and a mangled nail and if not particularly painful it was certainly an aesthetic disaster.


I decided that a little first aid was in order and I purchased some disinfectant on my way home so that I could bathe said toe, trim the battered nail and generally give it a little tender loving care.  As always whenever I made plans to do something even marginally practical there was a swelling of pride at my ability to look after myself and generally take care of stuff.  This feeling of self esteem took an immediate knock when I got home, put the disinfectant down on a bookshelf and promptly spent the next twenty minutes looking for it.


By the time I'd looked in the fridge and emptied everything out of the washing machine any sense of pride had pretty much vanished.  By the time I found the disinfectant (strangely on the first available flat surface I encountered after I walked in the door) I was pretty much over the entire process.  Nevertheless I had made the purchase and decided to proceed.


Arming myself with a dining room chair,  a roll of paper towel and a pair of, as it turned out, slightly larger than absolutely necessary scissors I took my much abused toe into the bathroom.  There the bathing and disinfecting went pretty much as planned and I started to feel pleased with myself again.  I took up the scissors and trimmed the battered and bloody parts of the toenail down to an acceptable level.  Unfortunately I had been steadying my foot with my other hand and while I was skilfully trimming the nail I was equally skilfully carving a centimetre long gash in the forefinger of the hand not actually holding the scissors.


What do you do when someone you're fond of makes an idiot of themselves?  You laugh of course and that's what I did.  Until I noticed that the blood was showing a decided reluctance to stop dribbling off my finger onto the fixtures of my bathroom.  A bandaid was in order and a hasty ransacking of my bathroom cabinet revealed that I did not possess such a thing.  It was then that I had my moment of genius.  With the assistance of paper towel, disinfectant and some surgical tape left over from a previous soccer injury I crafted a thoroughly functional bandage.  The surgical tape has also come in handy in the past to wrap Christmas presents.  Which only left me with the task of cleaning up what appeared to be enough blood to equip a decent sized murder scene.


I have made a vow to purchase bandaids so I'm prepared when something like this happens again.  Of course if I were slightly more functional I might make a vow to not get my fingers in the way of extremely sharp things in the future.  Knowing me I think preparing for an inevitable disaster is probably a somewhat more practical approach.