My, um, mom used to have my cousins, three boys, over to her house quite often when they were little to spend the night and to spend some time. And what she usually would do is, she had pajamas that they could wear at her house so they didn't have to bring pajamas every time. They -- it was usually just like a big T-shirt, like some of my sister and my old t-shirts that we didn't wear anymore, and when they were little they just were -- just kind of longer, you know, on them or bigger on them but they, but they liked that. So, she would usually -- they'd usually come, they'd change into the pajamas, and she'd usually throw their clothes in laundry. And oftentimes all three of them would just run around with those big T-shirts on. So, underwear obviously, but no, no shorts or pants, they just liked to wear the big T-shirts. That was like the cool thing that they wanted to do. So, they were doing that and their clothes were in the laundry, and I think my mom was -- my mom was not in the living room. I know that. She was down -- she was down the hallway, somewhere. And my sister and her, at the time, boyfriend, now her husband, but her then boyfriend were coming over as well and they pulled into the driveway and I said, oh, you know, "[Boyfriend] and [sister] are here. That's exciting," or something. So, the youngest of the boys. I was sitting in one of the chairs in the living room. He comes over to me super close, like as close as he could get to me and he said, "I need pants." And he had this just horrible look on his face, like he was mortified. Like he just was so embarrassed. "I need pants." I think he was okay, he felt comfortable just wearing this T-shirt around the family, but I think that thinking about my sister's boyfriend coming over and him not really knowing him and like having it be, I don't -- maybe they -- maybe that was the first time they met him? I don't know. I don't think it was, but again, I think, you know, he didn't often see him. They didn't -- they lived in Indiana at the time so they didn't -- they didn't see…

A lot of my injuries have been the result of doing silly things. I remember riding my bicycle through backyards in my neighborhood in 1989,1990. And I literally clotheslined myself. It was actually my mom's boyfriend's neighborhood, if we're being fully transparent here, which is only important to know because it means I was not super familiar with the environment. But as far as I could see, there was just really no fences, just open boundaries between yards. I was trying to take a shortcut back to my mom's boyfriend's backyard, and I could not see the clothesline in the neighbor's backyard. And it clipped me, like, almost like, you know, uh... Wait, oh no, why am I blanking, in horse riding, when you’re -- it's not jousting, is it the joust? You know when you have the big spear and your -- the lance, so to speak? It was kind of like that. It just knocked me off my “horse,” except instead of horse, it was my small little BMX bike. So, yeah, that was silly. I learned. No one was around to watch that one. So you feel embarrassed, but like, no one saw it. I still feel ridiculous. It's pretty funny how you just bounce back up back then. I have a feeling that it would affect me more now.

I went to visit, I went over to a guy I went to school with. I don’t think I’d ever been to his house before. And his parents were away and they had like a college student or somebody house-sitting with them. And she was kinda like in the mix, like we were down, I went down to talk with them. Maybe we were gonna play D&D, I don’t remember. But she was like right there, and I happened to look over on their -- what they had hanging on the wall, they had these fabulous like Native American rugs. And I said, “Oh my gosh, those are awesome! I like those Navajo rugs.” And um, oh gosh how did I hear about this.  Maybe it was later, one of the guys who was like at the house told me that after I left, she said that I was like obnoxious or hard to like or something. And one of the reasons she -- like the example that she gave or like the evidence she gave, was that I was being a know-it-all by looking at the rugs and saying what tribe had made them. And that just really floored me because I was like, well, I mean, I traveled down to New Mexico and Utah and other areas of the Southwest with my family, and we actually did have some Navajo rugs at our house. But I wasn’t really trying to pretend to be some kind of expert in like, Southwest American textiles. That’s actually just like, what they are called. Like even if you have like a Hopi or a Zuni weaver, people going down there they’d say, “Hey, I’d love to see some Navajo rugs.” So I just, I felt so unjustly accused. I mean, I was simply using just this sort of vernacular vocabulary, and she was accusing me of being like some kind of specialist. 

Every year when I was a junior high teacher, at the end of the year, we had a kind of a 8th grade end of the year, graduation type ceremony. And the high school graduated and they were done using the auditorium and so we would hold ours at the auditorium when they were done. Okay. So as an 8th grade teacher, I had to go over there and help them get organized and practiced, their going in and coming out and all that other good stuff. And I bought a lovely new pair of capris in a nice khaki color and I wore them to school that day that we were going over to do the practicing cuz I knew it was gonna be a -- and these were kind of like cargo khakis and so they were good because I could put all the stuff I needed to go over to the high school without having to carry my purse and all that other stuff, so it was great. So I did that, I got this really cute little sweater vesty thing that went with it. I bought the whole outfit from Eddie Bauer. It looked really good, I was happy. Get over to the high school, and I sat down in one of the front, very front row auditorium seats to watch the kids do their thing. And as I did that, I caught my pants on a spring that was sitting up in the auditorium seat because those seats were being replaced as soon as school got out, not knowing that the first row was not somewhere where people were supposed to sit, and I ripped my pants. Well I didn't have the opportunity to go back to the other school so I took off my vest. Which fortunately was a cardigan type and tied it around my butt and just kept going. And one of the kids said, “What are you doing?” and my other teacher buddies said to me, “What are you doing? That looks ridiculous.” I said, “It doesn't look as ridiculous as the fact that I have a big hole in my pants.” I said, “Don't sit in that seat,” and she went, “Ohhhh.” Anyway, I was lucky it was the end of the day that we were doing this but it was really, really not one of my favorite teaching days.