Walking On Broken Glass

Wow, two days back into the work routine and it’s Hello Stress! Good thing I didn’t resolve to give that up….

Anyway, last night, I was downstairs & had opened the pantry door where we have stored an interesting mix of sundry appliances, canned goods, annnnd the paint that came with the house. The  items are grouped by shelves, at least. Anyway, an empty mason jar fell, and instead of hitting the carpet, it hit the inside edge of the wood cabinet, and shattered. Lovely.

You know how sometimes your brain is just set to “Ricochet”? Well, mine was, as I was picking up shards of glass and thinking about how I really should bring the vacuum down and yet I knew I wasn’t going to, and the rest of the process went something like this:

So, this obviously isn’t tempered glass. Or whatever sort of glass they make that isn’t supposed to shatter into really sharp pieces.

I wonder who invented tempered glass. I wonder who invented GLASS?

Probably some pyromaniac motherfucker, since don’t you have to melt things to make glass in the first place?

So, hell. Is that all of it? I think so. Huh. Well, let’s see. Would I walk on this strip of carpet barefoot?

Yes.

That’s not a good answer, Jennifer. You grew up walking on glass shards.

Hell. I did.

Well, I’ve gotten nearly all of it, and the only way anyone’s going to step on it is if they shimmy alongside the cupboard here, clinging to it like those Indiana Jones Lego characters do on that Wii game. Which would actually be pretty funny.

/end brain ricochet

After that, I went off and did some laundry, and forgot completely to tell the Wo about the breakage. (In fact, he’s learning about it through the blog.  Now he’ll go and shimmy alongside the cupboard, just to prove I missed a piece.)  And yes, I did grow up picking glass out of the bottoms of my feet – my father’s glass studio was just off the kitchen/dining room, and I would often walk in there barefoot, and pieces of glass often made their way out into the house. I still recall being about ten, dancing wildly to a Beatles album and landing hard on a large piece of glass, way out in the living room. Oof.  That’s the only memorable gouging I recall, in fact, but the sudden sharpness cut me to the quick.  And I did learn how to walk into a room with broken glass on the floor. You step carefully, you disperse your weight consciously, and if a piece of glass pressed against your skin, you instantly recoiled, to minimize the depth it would penetrate.

Sure, I could’ve put on shoes. But I didn’t. Some things I just liked to experience the hard way, I guess. It was kind of a personal challenge, to be tough, to not bleed or cut myself. I guess I still do this brevity thing, just not always with broken glass….