I never was a big fan of the notion of destiny, because what if you have a destiny and it sort of sucks?  Sure if you’re a dancer in the Russian Ballet, or a star quarterback, or Captain of the Starship Enterprise, it’s easy to say, “This is my destiny,” because it’s awesome, but what if your destiny is to be the assistant manager at the McDonald’s in Barstow, California?  Do you suppose that dude ever shouts, “This is what I was born to do!  Meh.”  (Disclaimer: I have never been to the McDonald’s in Barstow.  I don’t even know if the assistant manager is a dude or not.)

The day before New Year’s Eve I was at home making a fire to try and bring some warmth to our little apartment in the ‘burbs, a task which I take on even though I don’t really have any special qualifications for firemaking.  In fact, they only turn out as well as they do because I cheat and start them all off with a Duraflame log, piling extra wood on once most of it has caught and started to crumble.  Anyway, I was poking around in this fire with the sawed-off end of a two-by-four, wanting to move some of the logs around to improve airflow and burn rate and other things  I like to pretend I know about before adding said end of a two-by-four to the fire.  I decided abruptly that a certain burning log should be moved, so I jammed the wood I was holding into it and started to lever it up, which meant my hand went down and because I didn’t plan this one out too well ahead of time I put my fingers down directly into the flames.

Fun fact!  The pain signal doesn’t have to make it all the way back to your brain before you react — it makes it to the spinal cord, which has no problem cutting in and moving your hand for you, which begs the question why it allowed you to use your hand in the first place since you were just going to go around doing things like sticking it into open flames.  Perhaps someone more versed in the sciences than myself knows the answer to that one, but my guess is that your autonomic nervous system is taking the tough love route with you, reasoning that if it always keeps you from sticking your hands into things that hurt you are just never going to keep them out on your own.

Anyway!  In the event that you put your hand directly into a fire like some sort of idiot, local control kicks in before the sensation of burning makes it very far at all, and your hand yanks itself away from the fireplace and back.  In some cases, you may find that your hand has also reacted by releasing the sawed-off end of two-by-four that you were holding.  I don’t imagine these sort of situations are very common at all, but I am willing to bet that in only one case in a million do the commands from the spine come through that dictate that the hand should hurl the piece of wood directly into one’s big toe.

Stubbing your toe is pretty bad, sure, but I can tell you that throwing a piece of wood at it and hitting it dead on is a lot worse, though it’s less that pain that makes you yell than the indignation that hitting something so small should hurt so bad.  ”ARRRGGHH!” I shouted, dropping to all fours and kicking my wounded foot back and up because I don’t know why.  Moving it away from the pain?  Trying to elevate it?  I raised it up behind me into the air, pressed my head against the cool tile in front of the fireplace, and yelled, “I SMASHED MY BIG LADY TOE!”

Lady toe?

Something you should know about me is that I have two younger sisters, and what they can tell you is what any younger sister anywhere in the world can tell you about older brothers: they are really, really annoying.  A few days before I was over at my mother’s place for Christmas, and my baby sister was over, too, and I guess she’s going to be twenty-three here before long but some things never change, and anyway we were taking a break from the game we’d been playing all morning of trying to catch one another unawares with a swift kick to the butt, and sat down at the dinner table to have cookies.  She took advantage of the break as an opportunity to start painting her toenails, a task from which I tried to distract her by poking her in the ribs with my foot.  She’s old enough now that she can just ignore me when she’s tired of my nonsense, so when I saw that my foot-poking tactics weren’t working, I plopped my foot down in her lap and said, “Paint my toes!”  She called my bluff and did so without missing a beat, painting three toes on my left foot a bright pink while I munched on my cookies.

I forgot all about the decorated toes of my left foot as soon as I put my slippers back on, chuckling when I switched out of slippers and into socks and shoes for the drive home, laughing in surprise when I took my socks off later, giggling when I looked down in the shower the next morning and discovered I had pink toes.  If you can imagine sitting the dude from “Memento” down in front of a computer and having him laugh fifty times in a row as you hit repeat on that “Charlie bit me” video on YouTube, you pretty much have my cycle over the next few days of forgetting about my pink toe nails, seeing them, and finding them hysterical all over again.  After a while I took to calling them my lady toes.

Here we are back at the fireplace, and since no one was there but me you’ll have to picture it: a fat guy dressed only in boxers and a T-shirt, head and hands pressed against the tile, one foot on the ground and the other up in the air as if I were trying to kick up into a headstand, bellowing about the pretty pink princess toes I had pointed at the ceiling.

If I had a destiny, ladies and gentlemen, that image pretty much sums it up:  I am a completely ridiculous person, to whom any number of completely ridiculous things occur on a regular basis.  It’s almost constant.  The very next day I was out for Korean barbecue and opened the wrapper on my chopsticks to find I only had one.  I’ve never heard of someone getting only one chopstick in one of those things before.  I’m pretty certain it didn’t happen to anyone else at that restaurant, since from what I could see I was the only one sitting around with a pitiful look on his face, holding a single chopstick in the air to try and get the attention of the waitstaff.

It’s fate, right?  Might as well have a sense of humor about it.

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