I Am Wearing A Mouth Guard Just In Case

I have always been uncomfortable with competitions. Probably because I have never been good enough at anything to win.

I had one trophy I got when I was a kid for a bowling competition. But every single kid there got one just for showing up. And it was for bowling, so not like I was all that thrilled with the meaningless trophy anyway.

I remember years of Field Day at school, which I felt would be more accurately called Day of Torture and Humiliation. We were required to enter at least five events. There were some kids who would enter every single event, and win many of them.

Then there were kids like me who searched the list for the events requiring the least amount of physical exertion and only finding two or three acceptable events would grudgingly sign up for the 50 yard dash, or the wheelbarrow race, where I would have my face mashed into the grass when my arms could not keep up with partner who was running behind me and then inevitably I would not be able to hold up my partners legs with my scrawny arms. We would finish a sad and pathetic last place. Everyone else in the race would already be done, drinking their gatorade, relaxing with a good book, looking up momentarily to point and laugh at the sheer absurdity of me engaging in any sport like activity. (I may be exaggerating slightly, but this is truly the essence of how it felt.)

And then no one would want to be my partner for any other event and I would end up being partnered with Marie, a girl who would pick her nose and eat it, and smelled as though she hadn't taken a shower since kindergarten. I would end up having my leg tied to hers in the three legged race, my face in her armpit, feeling that I was forever doomed to this lot in life.

Then I would get to the events I signed up for thinking I might have a chance at doing well in, like jump rope contest where the object was to jump as many times as you could without tripping over the rope in a minute. Once you became tangled in the rope it was over. The pressure was too much, I would trip after two or three jumps and everyone would laugh.

Or the ball distance throw where you would stand on homeplate and throw the ball as far as you could into the outfield and the longest distance would win. My ball usually fell just short of the pitcher's mound.

At the end of the day there were girls, I went to an all girl prep school so there weren't any boys, who would have ribbon after ribbon hanging from their necks. I would have nothing. I would pretend that I didn't care, but secretly I wanted to have some ribbons too. I wanted to be good at something. I wanted to be like my friend Pam who had an entire wall of big ribbons she won in horseback riding competitions, instead I had the bowling trophy cavorting with the dust bunnies under my bed.

I never won any academic awards either. There was ALWAYS someone who scored higher on the test or wrote a better essay.

Anyway, this is a long winded way of saying that the BoB thing is killing me. killing me softly with his song , which if that scene from About A Boy didn't make you laugh until you cried then you have no sense of humor and we can't be friends, so go away.

If it only lasted a day or two I could deal with it and laugh and shrug it all off. But it is going on forever.* And the voting more than once? I'm not sure I quite understand it.

I love writing for my blog and I am sure all the other people who have blogs do as well, otherwise what would be the point. And I am not sure how much a subjective award really says about a blog anyway.**

And before anyone decides to say anything, this isn't a post in which I am seeking validation by pretending I feel insecure. I have felt this way from the beginning but refrained from writing about it lest my intentions be misconstrued. But everyday I have had a pit in my stomach and writer's block just thinking about it.

I can't get over the feeling that even though I am in the lead for my category that eventually my legs are going to get tangled up and I am going to end up on the ground with my face in someone's armpit and astroturf in my braces.


*or January 30, same difference

** this has absolutely nothing to do with the awards and the gracious people who put them on, and everything to do with me.