blamebrampton | Meme post two

elanna9 tagged me for the seven quirky facts meme. I am desperate to procrastinate, and therefore very grateful.

1. I am an excellent swimmer. This never ceases to amaze Australians.
2. I was raised by hippie lawyers and lesbians. In terms of reading and arguing, this was the childhood from heaven. In terms of grooming and girliness, it was akin to being raised by wolves.
3. I have broken lots of bones, mostly thanks to cars, which are attracted to me.
4. I do not drive. Given 3, I see no reason to tempt fate. Also, I like walking a great deal, and usually have an interesting time on public transport. For this reason, I tend to live in cities with decent public transport. (And my next move will be to a city with good cycleways!)
5. I have very little memory of 1994 and the first half of 1995 due to my most exciting car/body interaction. I am also very vague on a lot of other events and some nouns for the same reason. It's all still in my head, it's just hideously disordered. I make jokes about being forgetful, but the truth is I will either remember something very well, or not at all.
6. I have never, ever wanted to be married. When the other little girls were playing Bride, I was playing War or Astronaut, and encouraging them to join in. That said, my current relationship is coming up on its 13th anniversary and I think I'll keep him.
7. When I was five, I read King Lear, saw it played on stage, and saw Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera at the cinema. During this period I remember staying awake at night horrified at the realisation that there was nothing. NOTHING. That I would die and be gone and that the world was wholly unfair, and that even if Gonerils died, so did Cordelias and nothing I did could change that. To allow me to get to sleep, I would lie there and chant "Fairies! Think of the fairies!!" This went on until I was about ... oh ... 22 or so.

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I was out one night with some band friends after a gig, and decided I wanted to go home now, so I grabbed my bike -- it up like the Starship Enterprise -- and began to ride off. I made two mistakes. The first was that I was going to the ATM three blocks down the road, so I didn't do up my helmet for this part of the trip, because I wasn't really in trip mode yet.

The second was that as I came up to a set of lights at which I had the green, I looked at the little white car waiting at the red turning arrow (I knew these lights) and assumed the driver was sane. Now, that driver was, but the taxi coming down the road behind him was not. He put his foot down, ran around the stopped vehicle, through the red arrow, and straight into the side of me.

In a way it was lucky that I wasn't wearing my helmet, as I was knocked unconscious when I hit the body of the taxi. It had hit me square on the pedals, damaging both of my Achilles tendons and gouging a hole in my left leg at the rear of the bike where the pedal was driven into it. I probably also broke my ribs as I bounced off the bonnet and windshield, rather than later in the piece.

From the taxi my momentum carried me in an apparently impressive parabolic arc towards the road, which I hit with my face, ripping off most of the skin and breaking my poor old nose (again), and cracking my jaw and cheekbone. Witnesses describe me bouncing disturbingly on my face and the top of my head; I had scabs behind both ears when I thought to look a few weeks later. My poor limp body was just jacknifed at these points, except for my right hand which was punched into the ground at some point, causing some very interesting fractures, and my left palm which seems to have skidded across the road but which was wearing a good gel-palm cycling glove, so the glove gave its life for me.

I was only unconscious for about a minute or two. When I came around there was a lovely lovely motorcyclist whose name I tragically lost (or he'd have received many flowers!!) who had stopped traffic around me, sent someone to secure my bike, made sure the ambulance and police were called and had used his leather jacket to wedge my head still, since he was fairly convinced I must have broken my neck.

His first and very sensible words to me were "Stay completely still!"

Mine to him were: "I hurt everywhere. But I suppose that's good if you think about it, right?"

He assured me that it was.

I told him I had a big party to go to in 10 days, and asked if he thought I'd look all right by then. "Errrr, probably not," was his quite correct assessment.

Meme post two

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