50 Shades of Stupid {Forensic Files}

If ya'll don't know Julie over at The Funny Thing of it Is... go check her out.  She's seriously hilarious, and totally sold out on Jesus… each one of her posts puts a smile on my face!

Anyway, she's started up a new series called "50 Shades of Stupid" where we share our totally dumb and embarrassing moments … and boy do I have a lot to share (including this photo - silly fun with Brianna, but probably one of the worst pictures of me EVER)!

This week's laugh-worthy moment is a mistake that really broke my heart - and it was so totally embarrassing that I never shared it with ANYONE except for my grandma - that is, until now!

I've been a fan of forensics since middle school - and we're talking Pre-CSI days.  Before Booth and Bones, Gil Grissom, or the oh-so-cheesy Horatio Caine.  I didn't love it for the over-dramatized TV-land fantasy... I loved the puzzle, the deciphering, the uncoding. 

I suffer from am crippled by social anxiety (which leads to lots of "50 shades of stupid moments" in itself).

I can't stand up and give a sales pitch, or really even speak one-on-one with a customer, without getting totally flustered  -- and as limiting as this issue can be as an adult, it was debilitating when I was a teenager; I conned tearfully persuaded many-a-teacher into letting me write an extra research paper or create a killer computer presentation in order to avoid the dreaded in-front-of-the-class-presentation!

But the idea of working in some unknown little forensics lab somewhere, playing with hair samples and vials of blood and fancy machines like gas chromatograph mass spectrometers… that I could do!  I loved the science of it, and the investigation and discovery, and most of all the fact that it was work I could do all by my lonesome.  And heck, I'm pretty sure I was the only 6th grader in the history of 6th graders who knew what DNA stood for (deoxyribonucleic acid - BOO-YAH!).

So you cannot IMAGINE my excitement when I saw a poster hanging at my high school for an informational meeting of the Forensics Team - SAY WHAT?!?  How awesome is this high school - we actually have a team where you can decode DNA and dust for fingerprints and take crime scene photos?!?  SIGN ME UP!

DISCLAIMER: If you know where this story is headed - don't let the secret out - because boy, did it hit me upside the head like a 2x4 studded with rusty nails!!!

I am totally giddy thinking about how awesome this new club is going to be.  The informational meeting is after school, and I'm pumped as I sit in the Large Group Instruction Room, ready to hear of the scientific escapades and criminal investigations that lie waiting for me to explore. 

So excited that I don't notice that the people sitting around me aren't the science geeks, or the quiet, self-conscious introverts like myself - no, I am surrounded by the StuCo members and the future-laywers-of-America types… the PUBLIC SPEAKERS!

And then it hits me like a ton of bricks.  Like an anvil dropping from the Heavens, not only to crush my dreams of the awesome year ahead, but also to totally mortify me for even being in that chair, in that room, with those people who could do the thing that I could not do.

If you haven't caught on yet, the Forensics Team?  They don't investigate crimes.  In fact, they are actually the DEBATE and Forensics Team.  That's right… they make a sport out of talking and debating and presenting (IN FRONT OF PEOPLE).

I would have given anything to shrivel up and disappear - to melt into a puddle of nothingness, drip down some drain hole and evaporate out of that room!  I was so heartbroken, but even more embarrassed for my stupid misunderstanding.

Needless to say I didn't join the Forensics Team.  And I didn't go on to become a great Crime Scene Investigator (though I did take a Criminal Justice course in college, and I married a cop - does that count?).

And as humiliated as I felt slinking out the back of the auditorium while the other attendees gathered to (GASP!) talk and mingle after the meeting, I'm sure in retrospect I was such a wallflower that nobody even noticed I was there in the first place.  And save for brief encounters of the Facebook kind, not a one of them is still in my life today.  Not one.  (But try telling that to a social-phobic teenage girl!)

So there you have it.  My 50 Shades of Stupid confession for this week!  Don't expect all to be so long or deep-rooted, but this was the first story I thought of and I knew I had to share! :)

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