And Now For Something Completely Different (The Adventure of the Treadmill)

The other day I spent maybe an hour telling a friend of mine about the awkward/funny/just plain weird things I tend to do on a daily basis. She had the bright idea of recording all of these things on the Internet, so that other people can share in my humiliation/awkwardness and then laugh at me.

I promptly told her that she was a terrible friend.

But then I started to think about it.

"I tell all these stories to the people I work with and hang out with, why shouldn't the rest of the world know? I have this awesome blog that I haven't been using very much. I like when people laugh. Aw, hell. I'll do it."

So, welcome, everyone to "Staci's Collection of Stuff that Happens to Her on a Semi-Regular Basis, But People Enjoy Hearing About It Anyway."

I should probably come up with a better title.

From now on, I'll relate to you guys the things that I do that either embarrass me, make me seem awesome, or that don't make sense at all.

I'll start you out with a classic:

"The Adventure of the Treadmill"

One day, I got the notion in my head that I wanted to work out. Looking back, that should probably have been a warning sign. See, exercise and I don't...get along. At all.

But, anyway, here I was on campus, wandering around the Heskett Center looking for a way to exercise that wouldn't make me look like a complete idiot. After all, the gym was full of beautiful/buff men getting their workouts on. Have to look good for the gentlemen, right?

I figured that the treadmill would be harmless. Ha!

Now, I do know how to walk. I feel like I should point that out. I can walk, run, and sometimes even skip. Okay? I can walk. It's just that sometimes I want to test gravity by falling over. ("Gravity's still working, guys!")

So, I was jogging on this treadmill, feeling the rhythm, rocking out to Glee on my music player when I felt my feet start to mutiny against me. My right foot had decided that we were going to have some fun.

I looked down and saw my toe catch on my other foot. "Oh, shi--"

Thanks to time moving in slow motion, I was able to grab the handrails on the machine before face planting completely. I grabbed those handrails and held on for dear life. I'm still not sure that this was a good idea.

Let me give you a visual here. I've got my arms spread wide, desparately gripping the rails on either side of the machine, I've got my legs being dragged back behind me by the still moving runner, my knees are touching the moving nylon (giving me a wicked rugburn), and my head is thrown back in a silent scream. So much for looking cool.

I decided that I would use my grip on the handrails to pull myself back up, get myself righted on my feet, and just continue running like nothing had happened. Of all the thoughts that were flying through my head, I don't know why I fixated on that one. I mean, I can't even do a chin-up with nothing pulling on my feet, how am I supposed to pull myself back up while being dragged?

Needless to say, that plan failed. I don't think I pulled myself back up at all. I had officially run out of ideas. The only thing left to do was accept my fate. I said a quick prayer, let my arms go slack, and let the runner pull me back as far as it could. Then...

I let go.

I'm not sure what I thought would happen, but it must've involved defying the laws of physics. Which is impossible. Anyway, I certainly wasn't ready for what happened next. What is Newton's first law of motion?

"An object in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force."

Let me tell you, nothing acts as a better outside force than the treadmill behind the one I had been on.

As I lay curled up at the base of the machine behind me, I laughed at the situation. It was completely ridiculous and I probably looked like a cartoon character during the whole fiasco. But I also let out a few tears. First because, OW! And second because out of a whole room of people who saw my act, only the girl who was on the machine I hit took the time to look down and say "Ya alright?" She never even stopped running.

I'm not sure what lesson I was supposed to learn from this, but I'm going to say it was:

"Don't exercise."

This is Why I'll Never Own a Robot

There are times when I really just hate technology. Why, you ask? Let me tell you about my evening.

It's a well-known fact that I live for music. Seriously, the only time I don't have my mp3 player on me is when I'm in the shower. Even then it's playing over the speakers.

Well, earlier this evening, I decided that I wanted to put some new songs on the stupid thing. Apparently, that was a big mistake. The entire thing froze up! So, I reset my mp3 player and tried it again. The same thing happened! So I tried again. And again. And again.

I've never claimed to be some kind of computer genius, and I'm not going to start now. There may be many solutions to the particular problem I was having, but I only knew of one. The only thing to do was to delete all of my music from my mp3 player. Now, I'm not completely stupid--I had to delete it, but I didn't want to lose any songs. After going through and double-checking that all of the albums were also in my music library on my computer, I hit the button. Delete.

Since I re-formatted my mp3 player, I had to redo all of the settings I had for how it syncs when I hook it up to my computer. That was fun. Then to the best part.

I am all for conserving space in my mp3 player, so I usually don't put a whole album on it. I'll have the whole album in my music library, but not my player. Because I'm a stickler about this--really. I get kinda obsessive--I had to go through each individual song in my library and put it in the sync list.

I finished that part about an hour ago. I clicked that "Start Sync" button and I waited. And waited. And I'm still waiting. As we speak, it's only about 75% complete. I really hope this works because I'd hate to go through all this work for nothing. Also, because if it doesn't, then I'm out of solutions. Except buy a new player. Which just isn't going to (can't) happen.

I hate technology.

If I ever have to do this again, I'm going to throw something.

On an unrelated note: I have on these fake fingernails and damn, it's hard to type.