Casaubon's Book

Well, I’m headed off for my weekend away – I’ll be at NOFA NH on Saturday giving the keynote and at the NESEA Building Energy Public Forum Panel on Tuesday night. Posting will be intermittent while I’m gone, but I figure I’d leave you all with a laugh at my expense.

Eric had a horrible moment the other day in class. Students were coming in and he was calling up a youtube video on space exploration for his students to see. But somehow while answering a student question, he committed a typo, which brought up, on a huge screen a hard-core porn site with very explicit visuals. After a second or two the students’ laughter alerted Eric to the problem, but he was about as embarassed as any human being could possibly be – and terrified that students might think he’d done it on purpose. He immediately apologized profusely, emailed his department chair about what happened just in case anyone took offense, and let’s just say he’s still blushing.

This got us on one of those great party conversations about your most embarassing moment. I still think mine is hysterically funny, even though I can’t tell the story without turning red. Eric thinks that because it only involved a few people, mine wasn’t as bad. I am willing to bet that my midwife has told this story a bunch of times, though, so I’m not convinced only a few people know .

It was during the very end of my pregnancy with Isaiah. Let’s just say that that night my husband and I were using a time-honored traditional method of trying to naturally induce labor – sex. And at the very moment of happiness, I felt a puddle of liquid appear underneath my butt. This is a little worrisome because you are not supposed to have sex after your water breaks, for fear of contamination of the little bugger. I wasn’t quite clear on whether this constituted “after” since it was pretty much simultaneous, but it seemed potentially problematic.

Well there are two choices here. Either my water broke or I peed my pants. I had read the baby books and I knew that the way you tell whether the liquid is pee or not is to sniff it – amniotic fluid smells sweetish, pee smells like pee. I tell my husband “I think my water just broke” and we get down to sniff the sheets. The sheets smell sweet – quite sweet, actually. Almost fruity.

It is rather late, but we call my neighbor to watch the younger kids, call my midwife who is very gracious about being awakened in the night, and head to the hospital. We get there. We test for amniotic fluid. The test is negative, and my now slightly-annoyed midwife says wearily that I must have wet my pants. I’m pretty offended by this and swear I didn’t, and demand that she repeat the test, saying that it definitely smelled sweet. She repeats, the results are the same, I go home. My midwife clearly thinks I’m an idiot and an incontinent one at that – and I’m wondering if she’s right. My neighbor is gracious but probably doesn’t think I’m that bright either – what kind of imbecile can’t tell pee from amniotic fluid?

So we go upstairs, tired and cranky and while Eric takes a shower, I go and change the sheets. As I do so, I find in my sheets a plastic sippy cup belonging to one of my older sons that was once filled with apple juice, tangled in the blankets, its cap slightly askew.

How about you? Got a favorite embarassing moment to entertain the group with?

Sharon

Comments

#1 abbie
March 4, 2010

As a teacher and a 39 1/2 week pregnant woman, I found that a doubly delightful story!

You can tell Eric that I had a similar situation happen to me. I was making a quiz on cell parts during my study hall, so I was projecting while searching google images for different types and parts of cells. I was projecting so I could get up and look at the image from the student’s perspective, to see if it was clear. Well after looking closely at the page of images that came up, one by one, I realized that at the bottom corner there was a naked woman. The screen had been up for at least a few minutes, and I quickly slammed my computer shut. I looked around at my study hall students, and to my SHOCK… None of them noticed! They were reading, listening to music, using calculators, or sleeping. I couldn’t believe it! (Since they were freshman in high school, I was very worried!)
#2 Connie
March 4, 2010

Hi Sharon, I really enjoy your posts. Please keep it up.
#3 NoAstronomer
March 4, 2010

This post isn’t about me, I’m the male half. I wasn’t there, I was at work. But I’m reliably informed this is the way it happened…

Two weeks before the due date of our second child my wife goes into our eldest’s (she was 5 at the time) bedroom to wake her up for kindergarten. As my wife bends down to perform the morning waking ritual of tickling, hugs, kisses etc she feels an internal ‘pop’ followed by a sort of gurgling noise.

Realizing immediately what has happened my wife manages to get back upright and step adroitly into the bathroom – conveniently located across the hall – before the deluge (so to speak) emerges. She doesn’t, however, make it to the bath or the toilet.

As she stands there, in a rapidly spreading pool of amniotic fluid, my wife looks round to see her daughter standing aghast in the doorway.

“Mommy … why did you pee on the bathroom floor?”
#4 risa b
March 4, 2010

My hair reaches down to my waist, but I have lost a lot of hair above my forehead, so every day, when I was working (since retired), I wound up my braids, pinned them, and popped on a relatively inexpensive medium-length wig.

My women’s walking group covered a mile every morning break at race-walk speed. One morning the toe of my shoe caught in a crack in the pavement, as we were crossing in front of a line of cars on the university campus, and down I went.

My old Judo training came in handy, and I tucked and rolled, coming up standing with wig in hand — it had fallen off mid-roll. As I put it on, I noticed the driver of the first car’s mouth had fallen open. So I stepped over, smiled, held up an imaginary Men in Black memory wiper, pressed its switch with my thumb, made a little “foomph” sound and said, “you have forgotten everything in the last thirty seconds.” He cracked up, and I rejoined the group.

I thought I was doing okay until we got back to the library, but my knees began shaking so, I had to sit on a bench awhile. You can handle things with your greatest aplomb in the moment and still die of embarrassment later …
#5 DD
March 4, 2010

That was a cute story! Until reading about the sippy cup, I was thinking (guessing) that gestational diabetes might result in “sweet pee”, though I have no idea.
#6 Left_Wing_Fox
March 4, 2010

Mine was a spoonerism. One morning I walked into the German Bakery, and ordered a medium cup of coffee, and a cinnamon shoe whore.

…

“Horseshoe! Cinnamon Horseshoe! Damn! and make that coffee a large too please, I obviously need it.”

I still trip over the name of that pastry every time I go in.
#7 Sharon Astyk
March 5, 2010

LWF – I’m sorry, but “cinnamon shoe whore” ought to be a pastry. Maybe I’ll invent one!

Sharon
#8 Jen
March 5, 2010

I also have a teaching embarrassing moment. I was supervising students in a computer lab. An 8th grade girl asked if I knew the URL for the Whitehouse. I said, “Just type in http://www.whitehouse.com” http://www.whitehouse.com is not the official Whitehouse site, http://www.whitehouse.gov is the official site. So as the screen appears, there is President Clinton and Hilary Clinton wearing leather “outfits” complete with spikes, whips, etc. My hands are then trying to cover the screen and telling the student to hit the back button, the student saying, “I can’t see the back button”, and all the other students turning to see what is happening.
#9 Bess
March 5, 2010

Hey Sharon — You gave permission, so I tell that story to all my students and clients as well, so still more people know it.
#10 Lora
March 5, 2010

A cautionary tale of the hyperintelligent farm dog breeds:

Lesson #1: Middle aged women should not have quite so many margaritas as we might think are healthy. We tend to want to re-live our youthful hi-jinks (e.g. skinny dipping).
Lesson #2: When selecting lock sets for your house, get the kind that can only be locked using a key/deadbolt, not the kind that swing shut and lock automatically. Intelligent, large dogs can operate the other kind.
Lesson #3, “Can’t Catch Me, I’m The Gingerbread Dog” is a fun game working breeds like to play, through the whole neighborhood.
Lesson #4, When wearing only flip-flops, angry and soaking wet, three margaritas will convince you that you can lift your weight in furry dogs, but after carrying them 1/4 mile home, your back will give out.
Lesson #5, When you have to explain what happened to your family doctor, or while explaining to your boss why you won’t be in for a couple of days on sick leave, just say you were moving a TV or something.
#11 karin
March 5, 2010

I was raised a good Catholic girl in the 70′s. I went to Catholic School and was one of the first alter girls at our church at 11 years old.

I was assigned to the Easter Service, the one my mother called the twice-a-year Catholic services. The 3 acolytes chairs were placed with the priest and the deacon up behind the alter and there was not enough room for all the chairs.

After communion my seat was taken by another acolyte so I sat in her chair and fell down the three steps. There was a collective gasp from the congregation. My mother sat in the front pew shaking her head, and the priest stood at the microphone and said,”That’s what you get for letting a girl on the alter, a fall from grace…”
#12 PlaydoPlato
March 6, 2010

Back in the mid 90s, I worked for a company that produced interactive software and live educational TV programming for the K – 12 age group. I was in charge of managing the web site which hosted content that integrated with our educational programs. Students from schools all over the country visited our site.

One time we were developing an educational unit based on St. Patrick’s Day. I was responsible for finding relevant and interesting web sites and posting the links.

Even though this was back in the days when there were only about 30 – 40,000 sites on the web, it was still a lot of work to find things, so we contracted out some of this work.

A few hours after I had posted all the links, I got called into the bosses’ office. It seems that one of the links I posted had, just three links down from the home page, a picture of two guys, wearing kilts, which wouldn’t have been a problem, except for the fact that both guys had their kilts pulled up and were doin’ it doggy style.

Lucky for me, that particular link came from our pre-approved contractor so I was off the hook. Unfortunately, we also had a corresponding newsletter that carried the same link… thousands had already gone out to the schools.
#13 Anonymous
March 6, 2010

I was, and am, a terrible map reader. My father thought the way to fix that was to have me navigate. On day, when I was fourteen, my father was driving 3 male seminarians to a meeting of some sort of PA, with me navigating. He kept quizing me about the names of towns we were about to pass through, and I knew that Intercourse was coming up. I kept telling myself, “Don’t say sexual intercourse, don’t say sexual intercourse.” Of course, I did. There was dead silence. I kept waiting for someone to laugh. No one did. To this day, I don’t know if they thought I was making a stupid joke or a horrible slip of the tongue. My father denies all knowlegde.
#14 Quatrefoil
March 6, 2010

I was a shy, earnest and fairly innocent undergraduate of about 19 giving a seminar paper in a class on British Working Class History. I had chosen to talk about the two 19th century labour reformers William Cobbett and William Hunt. I referred to them by their surnames and spoonerised them. Twice. I didn’t realise what I’d done until my lecturer made a very strange strangled kind of noise. And then I did it again. I did get a High Distinction for that paper, but I’ll never know if it was for the content or the entertainment value.