The One with the Stick

I was thinking about my, I mean our, blog today and realized I spend a lot of time talking about Justin or my family and not myself.  This is mainly because my 3(!) followers already know me pretty well and I'm helping them get to know their brother-in-law a little better.  Wendy uses her blog like a journal though so I thought I could do the same and put more of myself into it.  So here's a thought that has been on my mind a lot recently:

I dwell way too long on what other people think of me.  I am constantly aware of what I look like to other people when I'm doing things.  For example, last night I went grocery shopping and for some reason couldn't find the stinkin' cans of beans (which if you know me I can go through pretty quickly so I do buy them fairly often).  So I walked around the same 3 or 4 aisles in search of Rosarita and passed a few people more than once.  And what I was thinking was "They must be thinking I'm so stupid and don't know my way around a grocery store" which distracted me and made the search last even longer!  And what I could have been thinking was "Why are we all walking up and down the same aisles?"  They very well could have been in search of a similar item in as obscure a location as my beans, which means they're not perfect either!  I guess the silver lining is that I was dwelling on my own stupidity versus that of strangers but I think maybe I could cut myself just a little slack here- I did, eventually, find the beans.

Just another example of my own self-awareness and an explanation of the title, yesterday (I guess yesterday was a big day in terms of me looking silly) I was walking back across campus to the Chemistry building.  It was an extremely windy day here and the ground was covered with leaves and small branches.  In my attempt to step over one of these sticks I somehow managed to step directly on one end with my right foot, causing the other end to point up in the air and entangle my left foot.  How I achieved this feat I'll never know and if you laughed envisioning it I can't say I blame you :)  I did somehow catch myself before I fell on my face and luckily it was a windy day so there weren't many people out at the time, but I couldn't help thinking how ridiculous I must look to an outside observer.  I don't consider myself an extremely accident prone person, just slightly AP, so why am I (and the rest of the world, or a few others at least, I hope) so concerned about what we look like to other people?  Because in all honesty I'm so concerned about actually stepping completely over the stupid stick that I have no idea what you are doing!