Cast-Away

Life dictates that everything must be experienced at least once. You must get hurt once, you must eat amazing food once, you must get into a fight once and so on. Now, most people would want to bungee jump or sky dive or visit exotic places as their choice of a 'once-in-a-lifetime' experience. But me being me, my childhood fantasies were to experience a flood, have a fracture, know what it's like to slide a blade across your finger and eat sand (or Dettol, whichever was closer). The fun of most these experiences is partly from the fact that you don't have to tell people you're about to do them, you just do them. Impulsiveness, as I've articulated to myself a few weeks ago, defines what your world will be like. Saying so, my world would tend to be quite a topsy-turvy place.
The thrill you get when you break into an abandoned art gallery, the cool pain when the shaving razor cuts your thumb and the look on people's faces when you bend down to pick up something absolutely random in the middle of the road; these are the sort of experiences that I think are truly 'once in a lifetime'. But then, Dettol does tend to burn as it goes down your throat so I guess there has to be a certain amount of pain involved. I learnt this fact the hard way when I forgot the law of inertia for a few moments during my recent bus adventure, leading to a tiny fracture on my wrist. Despite the size of the fracture, my arm is to remain in a cast for the next 3 months. Now, the pain is almost non-existent but the many inconveniences that the cast creates more than makes up for such a profound loss. My driving lessons have been suspended till the start of another set of vacations and eating a roll has become a task akin to climbing Mt. Everest. But the loss that bothers me the most is that it has become almost impossible for me to hold a book straight and turn the page without resorting to a complex set of manoeuvres, none of them graceful enough to qualify as ballet. The ability to do a double thumbs-up is just another fact of life I must deal with now.
But there have been a few upsides to the whole situation. The isolation of my left thumb has taught me the power of a fore-finger and middle finger combined, which is pretty much what I've had to substitute the thumb with. Also, the inability to hold more than one object at a time has caused my canine tendencies to come to the fore, dictated by my practice of holding my answer paper in my mouth as I pack up to leave the exam hall. I expect that's the reason all the invigilators give me quizzical looks, along with the fact that I randomly smile during the exam while looking right at them. And most of all, I've learnt exactly how much it means to have both hands in working condition, opening my eyes to the travails of the handicapped. It's a hard life indeed...
Two out of the three fantasies I mentioned before have materialised. I wonder if a flood is due sometime soon...

Çiao!