irony

My head:

So last Wednesday I ran my head into a tree. No joke, I still have some scarrage to prove it. Somehow I have this uncanny magnetic attraction between my head and objects. It's not even like things come AT my head - no - the annoying part is that my head tends to run into these objects. Like when I ran my head into the doorknob in Greece - that was just a classic example of all the series of events that could have gone wrong.

So Weds - my boss decides to be super cool and take us on a field trip to Fire Island. So our group gets a gourmet picnic lunch together, and we ship out. We're walking along the trail thing (which is basically a wooden deck created to make ONE path so you can't stray off of it - it even had rails/fences) - and then someone calls me on my cell. I'm in the middle of moving CHAOS with this stupid apartment (more on that later) so I fumble through my bag until I find it - only to find that I missed the call and it's an unknown number. GREAT.

In the meantime, my boss has decided that "wouldn't it be COOL if we just hopped the fence, went through the wilderness and set up lunch on the beach?" So everyone had turned around to head towards a hoppable part of the railing.

I had missed the call anyways and now I was behind, so I swiveled around to catch up and proceeded to run straight into a thick, low-hanging tree branch. Literally out of a cartoon, I'm suprised there weren't little stars or birds flying around my head. I was on the ground for awhile, and the first person to come back to me was Donna, who said "Christina, are you really hurt, or are you just being dramatic?"

This would have been funny except I was bleeding and already had a welt forming. Mmph. So she gave me her Nalgene which had half frozen water/ice in it - but actually that didn't help because Nalgenes are round on the sides and indented on the bottom - so there was no way to actually get sufficient surface area on the welt, on top of the fact that it was cut so it kind of hurt to stick something hard on it.

Oh, but there's more.

So then we proceed to hop the fence and follow the pack through the thicket. Yes, thicket. Thorns, shrubs, tall grass, and all. The people wearing shorts got their legs all scratched up, and if there was still skin left, the mosquitos ate them. Those bugs work FAST.

So here I am, trying to balance this Nalgene on my forehead, trying to wade my way through the thorns etc. when suddenly I realize that my foot is completely wet.

Yep - we're wading through a marsh. A muddy one at that.

So then it became "screw it, just walk as fast as you can and get through". Which is why everyone ended up scratched up and muddy with soaking feet by the time we got to the 'beach'.
Oh - but there's more.

So we spread out for the picnic, which turned out to be really good. And then my boss decides "wouldn't it be COOL if we walked along the water and saw where it took us?" So we go, and we hit this dock, and climb up the slats to have a nice view of whatever body of water we're looking at.

But then I started to feel sick - but there's no bathroom in the middle of nowhere, especially when you off-roaded it from the trail. So I decided to just follow this path and find my way back to where we started. I'll spare the details of the LONG walk back, but it was successful so at least something wasn't disastrous.

But on my way back, I walked about 2 min before I found the tree that had knocked me out. So the kicker is - if we had just kept following the path, we would have gotten to this dock, AND to the main beach.

Written on July 4th, when I am the only one in the office. Sure is dark in here...