Earlier in this blog, I described the SECOND most hilarious (Read humiliating)fall that I have done in public. Well it doesn't seem fair to tease about the first (read worst) fall. Here it goes:

It's early on a weekday morning and I'm rushing to catch the #33 bus that meanders around Magnolia before heading downtown. It's important to catch that bus, because the Magnolia buses only come around every half hour or so, and that is if they are on time. This has taken some getting used to, so I am running down my dead-end street and down a flight of stairs to the street below. As I reach the street, I can hear the bus chugging up the slight incline towards the bus stop and me, about a half block behind it.

I'm running, partially to make sure that the bus stops, and because I recalled being annoyed observing people taking their own sweet time to get on a bus that is waiting specifically for them. I race to the other side of the street and continue running along the grass strip between the sidewalk and the street.

About 15 feet in front of the bus, my foot catches something on the ground–a clump of dirt, a rock, who knows– and I go sailing in the air. After some considerable air time, I land on my hands and knees, skidding in the wet grass and dirt. As I let out a loud swear word before I can gether my senses, I look up at the bus.

I see the driver, and several passenger heads, craning to look at me. They all have the same expression, of curiousity, amusement, and horror on my behalf. I hear that hydraulic sound as the driver opens the door for me.

I get on my feet and notice the two green and brown stripes working their way down my khaki pants from my knees to my ankles. What should I do? Do I turn my head in shame tell the driver "nevermind" and walk home to change my pants, come back and get the next bus? Or, do I suck it up, get on the damn bus and endure the entire day in my downtown office with grass and mud on my pants?

No matter what I do, I'll always be that girl who bit it in front of the bus. I don't want to be that girl who bit it in front of the bus and was too embarrassed to get on it. I got on that bus.

As I mounted the steps, I realized that not only did the front half of the bus witness my fall, but many surely heard the profanity as well. I put my fare in the machine, declined a transfer and walked towards the back of the bus. I felt like Mr. Rooney at the end of Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I could almost hear that Yello song (chuka chu kah...)

I smiled and began to laugh at my own fortune, but no one would laugh with me. No one would even LOOK at me! I was invisible! I finally found a seat and sat in it, thinking what a fun day I had in store for me. Suddenly this little gray head peeks from around the seat in front of me and this little old lady says, "Are you all right, dear?"

"I'm just fine, thank you," I said, and laughed again.

I've always had a problem with taking things a little too literally.

When I was little, I came home from school visibly upset, and crawled into my Dad's lap when he came home from work. "I don't want to have hot lunch anymore," I said with a quivering voice.

(SIDENOTE: I don't know about your school, but hot lunch was BIG STUFF for us, and a rare treat for me. My Mom usually made our lunches, and allowed us hot lunch only on special days. Those days were themed lunches related to holidays, with itms like pilgrim stuffing, shamrock peas, etc. It was a big deal for a first grader, plus you usually got chocolate milk).

"Why?" My parents asked.

"Because, today, " I said getting more and more upset, "They served Leprechaun stew!"

It would be nice to say that I've grown out of my literal sensibilities, but I haven't. And nowhere is this more obvious (or more painful) than in the dating scene. I am clueless to the subtle ways that men and women send and receive signals. You pretty much have to hit me on the head caveman-style for me to understand what is going on.

A while back, I was relaying an odd encounter I had in the grocery store to a friend. A man was standing next to me in the rice aisle, when he touched my shoulder, a bag of brown rice in his other hand. "Excuse me, do you know how you are supposed to cook this?" he said, motioning to the bag in his hand.

"Like other rice, I would suppose...boil water and steam it?" I said, thinking the directions might offer better advice than I ever could. Who doesn't know how to cook rice?

"Oh, right," he said, blinking at me. "Thank you." With that, he walked away.

"What an idiot," I told my friend as an end to the story. "No, YOU are the idiot," she said. Huh?

"He didn't care about the rice, you moron. Are you just book smart?"

"You try and read something else in everything," I said. "Why would he ask me how to cook rice, then?" "Hopeless!" she said.

I may be hopeless, but I was recently justified in the way I think in these situations. Now, I'm not into this too much, but the other day I attended a conference for work, and one of the sessions was determining your "True Colors," which is a watered down version of the Meyers-Briggs personality test. By determining your color and the colors of those around you, you are supposed to learn more effective ways to communicate based on their colors.

According to this process, I am a green with a strong secondary orange color. I won't bore you with what that means, except that it made sense, surprisingly.

As a sarcastic and jaded person, this True Colors seems silly in that horoscope, fortune-telling kind of way. But after reading the characteristics of "greens," I had to admit that some of it was dead-on.

In the sheet on communicating with greens, one of the tips said "don't read between the lines. When greens are asking for information, that's exactly what they are doing and nothing more."

So, sorry brown rice guy, my answer didn't mean "I'd rather eat that brown rice, bag and all before I would ever have a conversation with you." It really meant, "Steam the rice fella, and good luck with that."

CONFIDENTIAL TO M. IN MT: That said, I'm not a complete social moron. The sushi conversation did not go down like this:

HIM: "We should go and have sushi sometime."

ME: "I hate sushi."

It was more like this:

HIM: (Out of the blue) "Do you like sushi?"

ME: "No, I don't."

There is a difference, I swear!

I give up.

Today is the 14th anniversary of the day Mt. St. Helens blew.

I remember that day quite well...my family was barbequing in our back yard when we noticed that it was eerily quiet. It was snowing ash, I remember a baseball helmet on our deck was dusted white.

Missoula got quite a coating of ash. We weren't allowed outside for four days (eternity for nine and ten year-olds) and the cabin fever was brutal. No one went outside without surgical masks, and except to ride a bike to the store for water and emergency supplies (the fine ash would ruin engines and easily find its way into your lungs) or to hose down the house, cars and yard.

The thrill of extended school closures quickly dissipated once we learned that those days would have to be made up on Saturdays or in the summer. School in the summer? I felt sick.

Finally, we were allowed outside. The ash was everywhere. My little brother scooped it up in jars, convinced that those jars of ash would be his ticket to fame and vast fortunes in a few years when he could sell them as souvenirs.

How funny that you can still buy gargoyle statuettes and other knickknacks made from St. Helens ash, alongside the huckleberry taffy, mini indian purses and agates at the 10,000 Silver Dollar Bar along I-90.

I wonder what he did with his jars of ash?

Bumper sticker spotted today on the Montlake bridge:

NOBUSHIT

Two stories of the past few weeks reminds me of how true it is that people see what they want to see.

Case in point: The infamous photo of the caskets carrying U.S soldiers who were killed in Iraq. Many people (myself included) saw a touchingly sad image showing the respect that those soldiers received (and deserved) on their final journey home. Many saw what hundreds of AP bylines from Fallujah fail to deliver with such an impact: our soldiers are dying over there.

There were others who saw something completely different in that picture. They saw an image that conveniently fed into the anti-war liberal agenda, the exploitation of dead soldiers and an unfair attack on Bush. Many were outraged that the paper would defy government orders to not print those types of pictures.

Another story from Prosser, Washington offers similar disparities in how an image can divide. A 15 year-old kid works on an art assignment to keep a visual diary. In it, he expresses his feelings about the U.S. involvement in Iraq, including drawings of Bush’s head on a stick. The art teacher, alarmed at the drawings, turns the diary in to the principal, who in turn calls the police, who contact Secret Service.

Again, many people see a kid expressing his opinions about a controversial war. Others see an anti-American kid who didn’t get the punishment he deserved.

I find these stories to be very troubling. I guess I don’t understand. If it were my son, husband, sister, or friend who lost their life in Iraq, I would take such comfort in that picture of those caskets. More importantly, I would still believe that it is our government’s obligation to ensure that the American public see those types of images.

As a democracy, we have a right to see the entire, ugly picture when it is our people who are dying on foreign soil. Does anyone not see the irony of the Pentagon trying to control the images of war we see, a war that started to remove a dictator who controlled the media for his purposes?

The government line about giving the Iraqi people “freedom” rings more and more hollow the longer it goes on.

I’m so saddened that a kid drawing an effigy of Bush (images of which are broadcast regularly on television news from the Middle East) is punished by his school district for making his art assignment political. It saddens me even more to learn that the kid, who sports a Mohawk in a small town, doesn’t “fit in.” I wonder if this ever would have gone as far as it did if that were not the case.

It is okay to not like what you see. But it is not okay when politicians and other people with authority to prevent others from presenting those pictures, warts and all. If the first amendment doesn’t define the freedom that our politicians so glibly talk about when discussing democracy, I don’t know what does.