That was me about one o’clock this afternoon. Well, no, maybe one thirty? Well, whenever it was. Around there.
I was working on my transcription assignment when I got to a point (about two minutes into the 59 minute interview) where three people were talking at once, because the interviewee was trying to explain where the small town his father had emigrated from was located, and the interviewer was trying to write it down (I guess?) and getting it wrong, and both the interviewee and some other guy in the room (that I have no idea who he was or why he was there) were trying to correct him. Three people, talking at once, using place names of which I only knew how to spell two.
I was feeling a little overwhelmed, and decided to take a brief break by getting out my atlas and looking up the place name I didn’t know. It’s a massive atlas, hardback, that I bought to replace the old paperback one I got back in early high school. (It was at least after the break-up of the Soviet Union and the re-unification of Germany, but a lot of other things are no doubt drastically altered since then. Haven’t looked, but the copyright date said ’91, and I’m pretty sure that there have been a number of changes to national structure in some parts of the world since then.)
So, this massive atlas was too big to fit on the shelf, so it was lying on top of some other books that were standing up, and it had a bunch of National Geographics and stuff piled on top of it. Because I ran out of room years ago, so things are just piled up on top of other things. Anyway, as I was pulling it out, trying to slip it out from under the pile, I noticed the corner was catching on the molding on the front of the book case.
About the book case. It’s a cheap one, made out of…what’s that stuff called? Pressboard? You know, the stuff where they turn a bunch of wood into chips and then combine it with glue and pour it into molds? (At least, that seems to be what they do.) Anyway, one of those “buy it in a box and assemble it yourself” things. The ornamental molding on the front, therefore, is only attached by dowels. I think they tell you to use wood glue on it to make it stay in place, but…yeah, I don’t do that.
So the molding comes off sometimes. And I saw that the side molding was starting to come off, so I caught it and kept pulling the book out.
That’s when the upper molding landed on my head.
It left a lump on the side of my head. It really did. I always thought that was just a gag, you know? I mean, it’s not like it was a huge lump that was visible to other people, but I could feel it with my fingers. It’s mostly gone away now, though it still hurts a lot.
Consequently, I got nothing accomplished today, because it was too hard to focus through the pain. Plus listening to things hurt. So naturally when I talked my brother into taking me somewhere so I wasn’t sitting here alone doing nothing but racking up things to buy on Amazon, he spent the whole car trip with the music turned up just too loud and talking even more loudly to be heard over it. That did not help my head any…but I couldn’t really bring myself to ask him to tone it down, because then he would have felt guilty.
The worst part of all this?
That atlas I was pulling out turned out to be garbage. I had bought it on clearance somewhere without actually looking at it, and it turned out that all its “maps” were terrain indication 3-D-like maps, so you can’t read the few names written on them.
The old atlas was actually a better one, even though it didn’t have enough detail to help me, and of course it’s out of date and everything.
I’m gonna have to see if I can buy a new one, a good one, somewhere. Hopefully without spending too much money on it.
We're All Mad Here! 