My Most Embarrassing Moment

As promised, a light-hearted, humorous post!

So far, this blog has been liberally peppered with hints and quips relating to my many, frequent embarrassments. But what, you may well be asking yourselves, is my absolute number one Most Embarrassing Moment? Buckle in, folks. You're about to find out.

In my senior year of high school, two of the science teachers organized a group trip to Belize and Guatemala. Supposedly it was physics-oriented, but apart from one afternoon spent teaching local schoolchildren to make bottle rockets (I got stuck with four surly teenage boys, who clearly hated me, my soda bottles, and everything I stood for), we spent nearly three weeks hiking, snorkeling, and exploring the jungle. Sounds awesome, right?

It was. But there were more than a few bumps along the way...

Let me start by illustrating how fundamentally ill-suited I was for this type of trip. 17 year old Natalie wore a lot of matchy-matchy Lacoste polos, Seven jeans, and designer flip flops. 17 year old Natalie participated in orchestra and newspaper, not sports. 17 year old Natalie's idea of being outdoorsy was attending kegs in cold public parks. So when 17 year old Natalie approached her physics teacher (who, for the record, already hated her - I mean, me) with a signed permission slip and a fat check, said physics teacher openly laughed.

"You do realize you can't bring your hair straightener to the jungle?" he asked.

17 year old Natalie saucily replied that she did, in fact, know that.

"Well all right," he said finally. "This should be fun..."

(And by the way, I DID bring my hair straightener, because you never know. I gave up on that after the first night. You win this round, Mr. Muhs.)

For comparison's sake, the other girls on the trip were all tall, tan, toned, members of the school's soccer, basketball or cross-country teams. The kind of girls that don't need to straighten their hair; that look good sweaty; that never get sunburnt or dehydrated or bitten by every single mosquito IN THE WORLD. Athletic, outdoorsy girls who are consistently unfazed by weather or exertion.

I am not one of those girls. I do not look ruggedly beautiful after a good hike: I look like a bewildered tomato and/or bear maul victim.

Mmmm.

All in all, I like to think I held my own relatively well throughout the trip. Yeah, I gave up on paddling during the seven-mile tube float, but the rubber tube was giving me a rash and I got there in the end, didn't I? And yeah, I took too much Benadryl and wasn't allowed to steer the canoe, but whatever, I have allergies, OK? And yeah, they told me not to get too close to the tapir in the national zoo and maybe it did pee on me, but it was dark, all right? And yeah, I was the one who forgot their lacy underwear on the beach during a middle of the night group skinny dip, and yeah, the groundskeeper yelled at us over breakfast because a local animal could've choked on it, but I'm sorry, you know?

Me and The Tapir, pre-peeing incident. That wily bastard...

All in all, I think I did OK. Except for this one day...

We went on a massive jungle hike that lasted almost four hours. Hiking isn't exactly my forte, but I was keeping up. The scenery didn't hurt, either.

Some King Kong shit, amirite?

...aaand there's me, looking flustered and out of shape.

The big reward for completing this hike was a swim at the end, in the most perfect little watering hole - waterfall and all. Like everyone else, I had worn my swimsuit under my hiking clothes for this exact reason. This watering hole also happened to have a perfect little rope swing, which my classmates took great joy in using, arcing high over the pool before letting go with a splash and a whoop.

Well obviously I was gonna go on the rope swing. I had to. With the eyes of my group focused right on my pale butt and my inappropriately dainty black bikini, I took hold of the rope, said my prayers, and launched off from the rock.

...and dropped, much like a rock, straight into the shallows less than a millisecond later.

This was bad, and I'll tell you why. The whole point of the rope swing was to swing you out over the deeper parts of the pool; you had to wait, then let go at the right moment. By immediately falling, I slammed right into the sharp rocks of the two-foot deep shallows. That shit hurt.

My classmates immediately recognized the severity of the situation, gasping and rushing to my aid. Though I was hurt, pretty badly, I couldn't even stand up to show them that I was "OK" because in my fall, both halves of my bikini had accumulated an unbelievable amount of pebbles, sand, and mud. So while everyone else was splashing towards me, I was crouched in shame, the water barely deep enough to conceal me, trying to scoop half the fucking river out of my swimsuit before anyone reached me.

This I eventually succeeded in, finally standing and saying, "I'm OK, guys!" Then I looked down. Both of my knees were gushing blood. Whoops. Not so OK.

One of the chaperones took me away and patched me up, then I slunk back to the watering hole. Applause greeted my less-than-triumphant return, and then a chorus of encouragement: my classmates insisted that I "get back on the horse" and "try it again!" They assumed, as I assumed, that my fall had been a horrible mistake: that I had panicked and let go too soon, or maybe lost my grip.

We were all wrong. So very, very wrong...

Determined to prove myself and never one for saying "No," I clambered back up. I was in Belize, I reminded myself. If ever there was a time to take every opportunity - to face your fears - to give it another go - this was it.

Once again, I gripped the rope, took a step back, and swung.

Once again, I almost immediately fell, with a crash, right into the rocky shallows.

This time, there was only silence.

What happened? I didn't panic, I didn't lose my grip. I just literally did not possess the upper body strength required to support my own weight. Is that or is that not the most pathetic testament to my physical fitness imaginable?

The bus ride back to camp that night was an uncomfortable one, to say the least. The memory burns on, both in the back of my mind and in the form of a video that unfortunately still exists of the incident. Am I going to post this video?

No fucking way.

Instead, here's a more flattering picture from the same trip:

Me in my element: Chanel sunglasses, iPhone, and not hiking.
#whitegirlproblems