Hey, Uncle Scar*, when I'm king, what'll that make you?

For someone who is as clumsy as I am, I only have, like, two scars. One is from when my sister dug her nails into my arm and made me bleed. She used to do that all the time, so I'm not sure why I don't have more scars from that. The other is on my forehead, from when I was three and fell down and hit my head on the corner of the coffee table. Ow. To my credit, I'd only been walking for a couple of years so I wasn't very good at it yet. I got some stitches and a scar that I tell people I got when I fought off a lion on a train with a whip.

When I was a senior in high school, we went putt-putting and, on the last hole of the course, I decided I was going to hit my ball as hard as I could. Most people would know right away that this is a terrible, terrible idea, but I am not one of those people. So I whacked that ball as hard as possible (heh) and, wouldn't you know it? It hit a rock, ricocheted, and hit me right in the forehead, IN THE EXACT SAME PLACE AS MY FOREHEAD SCAR. At the time I thought it MEANT SOMETHING. It didn't, though. I did not get a scar that time, just a nasty bump. Here are some other times I should have gotten scars but didn't, thanks to my hard-working guardian angel.

Times I probably should have gotten scars, in chronological order:

1. I got stuck in a pool hole. I was five or six and had been EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN from playing around in the backyard of my babysitter's house, because they were putting in a pool and there was a giant hole in the ground and, I don't know, they didn't want me to get stuck down there and get buried in cement because then there'd always be this 6-year-old poltergeist hanging around their pool singing the Fraggle Rock theme song and throwing rocks into the pool water and HOW ANNOYING would that be if all you wanted to do was get a tan or whatever? Anyway, I wasn't allowed back there and had been told numerous times NOT to play around back there, so of course I played there as much as I could. Until the day I was climbing out of the pool hole and my shorts got caught on a (rusty) nail. I think I had to scream for someone to come get me and then immediately start crying once I was free so I wouldn't get in trouble.

2. I fell off of the parallel bars on the school playground and landed in the gravel on my face. ON MY FACE. No scars, though, maybe because my glasses protected me? My mom had to come to school and take me to get new glasses because the gravel I FELL FACE FIRST INTO had scratched them all to hell.

3. I fell backwards off of a Fisher-Price teeter totter (remember those orange and yellow ones?) because I stood on one end and made my friend push down really hard on the other end. My theory was that if my friend pushed down with enough force, I would go flying through the air like my childhood idol (Peter Pan), but instead I fell and hit my head on the concrete.

4. I slipped on a Slip-n-Slide and not in a good way. Here was my idea: I would run toward the Slip-n-Slide, gracefully jump onto the edge of it, and the momentum would carry me across the Slip-n-Slide like I was surfing. Here is what happened: I ran toward the Slip-n-Slide, cowabungaed onto the edge of it, slipped ass over tea kettle (I love that saying and am pretty sure I've never gotten a chance to use it before), and landed on my back, smacking my head on the ground in the process.

5. I fell backwards off of a swing. I'm still not sure how this happened but I landed on my head. Hmm, I'm sensing a theme here...

6. I was at my friend's house once and we (my friend, her brother, my sister, me) were throwing rocks at one of those electric poles. I don't know why. I'm sure we had a reason. Anyway, her brother threw a rock and it somehow whipped around (seriously, I was standing BEHIND HIM, I think he broke the laws of physics) and hit me in the forehead, right between the eyes. It didn't draw blood or anything but do you realize how close I came to losing an eye? I just measured and I came, like, A CENTIMETER CLOSE.

7. I climbed and then jumped off of a billboard. Not a very tall billboard. But, like, it was really hard to climb up? So I thought it would be really hard to climb down? And so obviously it was a much better idea to just jump. Sure.

8. I fell out of my loft in college.

9. I climbed a fence to go nightswimming on two different occasions. I did almost drown the one time, but escaped without any near death experiences the second time, and without scars both times, even though I have a vague recollection of Mary and I racing around the edge of the pool.

10. I slipped and fell on Lake That's What She Said. Granted, it wasn't very hard (THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID) but I did scrape my hand pretty badly.

All of my other scars are emotional but even they are (mostly) my own fault.

*Get it...GET IT?