I once read a blog post by a girl who was self-conscious
about her skin: apparently, she bruised easily and she hated it. I remember
considering this bemusedly, as I’ve never been ashamed of my bruises—they’re
like a comic strip I once read by Bill Watterson:
That’s right. Grass-stains and bruises: signs of a life
being fully lived. Temporary tattoos of awesomeness. If they show you’ve been
doing something cool, wear ‘em with pride!
A caveat follows. I say this with enthusiasm, but I do
acknowledge a disappointing trend: it’s never my most adventurous activities that
leave their mark properly. If I come home from a full night of jujitsu, I’ll be
sore all over and covered in small points of tenderness, but it’s the table I walk
into afterwards that leaves the biggest mark. What gives? I still tell people
it comes from martial arts, and I’m probably not actually lying. It’s
believable enough that after a good, hard workout, I was too tired to get out
of the way of the oncoming furniture, and I also have a selective memory that works
to my advantage. But, for real—it happens over and over again that the small,
daily things that didn’t seem worth being cautious about leave much more
evidence behind than the larger, more dangerous undertakings I pursue. I guess
that for big things, I take safety precautions—and if I do get hurt, it’s too
deep to be obvious until days later when I have no recollection of the cause of
injury. Thus, when I tried to use the reminders I’d inadvertently left myself on
the canvas of my skin to refresh my memory on my most recent exploits, I came
up with an anticlimactic tally:
To be accounted for: 7 bumps, scrapes, and bruises.
- One scrape on the back of my calf from tree climbing.
- One scab on the back of my heel from running down the pebbly apartment stairs in bare feet and on one step, landing too close.
- A bruise on my arm and my hip from no-idea-what
- Four maladies for my left middle finger alone:
- Tip—shiny with scar tissue from where I cut into it while shelling acorns. (For the record, there are more optimal species to gather from than Texas live oaks, if you want to go acorn-hunting. Now I know.)
- Nail—still dried blood underneath it from rebounding a basketball poorly during an IBM celebratory barbeque two or three weeks ago.
- An indiscernible pinprick from a health check-up.
- A burn mark on the knuckle from the stove.
This is a respectable number, but for some of these, I know I could have found cooler causes. I’d just started my aerial silks class earlier that same week, and over the weekend I’d done a little fire-staff for the neighborhood kids. So, basically, I could have burned myself while fire-spinning, but no, this mark comes from the time I was putting a baking tray too close to the burner that I’d just been using to make scrambled eggs. *makes a face* I’ll just have to try harder next time. How about we go back to grass stains? I got a right-purty green smear on my slacks on the day that the kids next door were borrowing pieces of cardboard to slide down the hill. It even came out when I washed it, which is nice, because there's only one other pair of slacks in my closet. It also means that these pants have been through the dust and dirt of Tanzania (and the paint—I think this is what I was wearing that day that I got locked in the KCMC bathroom, oh so long ago) and still live on to get dirty in some future day, grass-sledding again with the neighbors. That’s a trusty pair of slacks—and that’s just the life it’s had since I got it from Goodwill. ^_^ I like things like that—things that can be well-used and still-useful. *glances down at the fading scars on her arms and legs* Those sorts of things are worth keeping around for a long time. ^_^
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