I, Who Wobbles, But Shall Not Fall Down

I've begun to notice that I'm getting a little klutzy as I get older. I don't think it's a sign of any mental deterioration on my part. It just seems that sometimes while eating lunch, my brain likes to signal my body to throw my fork cross the table without asking for my consent. I have no clue as to why this happens, but it does. It's getting to the point that when I go out on a date with someone, I find myself having to hand them a little card which reads: “Thank you for having dinner with me on this fine evening, should I impale you with a piece of cutlery, please realize that it's completely unintentional. Enjoy your meal.”

We all drop things from time to time, so at first I didn't think much of it. It just seems that as of late, the number of little things I drop, or knock over, have been increasing. It starts out small. A spoon, a plastic cup, a tin of mints. But then it seems to increase to larger things. You're having a nice shower, and you somehow manage to knock the shower curtain rod down. Not dislodge it a little, knock the whole thing down. Each time I do one of the more major acts of klutziness, I picture in my head Dick Van Dyke tripping over the ottoman, and hear the first few bars of the theme to The Dick Van Dyke Show.

I wonder if there's a connection to this and my increased intake of coffee I've been experiencing lately. It seems that once or twice a year, I'll go through a period when I'm drinking more than my usual share, and it'll often wind up giving me the “three o'clock shakes”. On an average morning, I drink around two cups of coffee. However, it's a mug that holds around a good 16 ounces worth of coffee. So by the time I'm in a rare mood, and drink four cups of coffee, I'm a little on edge in the afternoon.

The coffee will make my hands shake, just ever so. Only noticeable if you really stop and look. In addition to the shakes, it will trigger my nerves a little bit. Friends invite me out for a nice Fall picnic, and I show up in a giant sun hat and covered in a tarp, because I fear that “bright glowing orb in the sky”. So far this all has been limited to the motor skills in my hands. I've yet to have fallen down because of this, or found myself waking up in a park with no recollection of how I got there.

This is not to say that there hasn't been at least one “incident” in which I took a tumble. At a friend's birthday party around a month ago, there was a small stage with a live karaoke band. This was all set up in her backyard, very simple, very nice. Most of the party guests had taken a turn, or in some cases three, at the microphone. After a few turns of people belting out hit after hit after hit, in varying degrees of success, came the prodding for me to take the stage and sing something.

Being a shy little introvert, with a touch of social anxiety, I waved everyone off with the “I'll ruin the party if I sing” line. Yet, people still insisted. I wasn't going to give in, until a redhead I found myself particularly attracted to asked me to sing something. Suddenly I went from Mr. Shy in the Corner to “I will sing ALL THE SONGS!” I took the stage, and began to belt out that 1980s classic “876-5309/Jenny”.

Much to my shock, the sound of my voice did not cause anyone to flee in horror. Instead the crowd seemed to be enjoying it, and I started feeling so confident in my self, that I began to move about on stage a little. However, there is such a thing as overconfidence, and that's what happened when I somehow foolishly convinced myself to take a stage dive at one high point in the song. In my brain, I though it would be one of those really impressive moves that would make the redhead want to have dinner with me. In actuality, I crashed into the redhead, and landed face down in the potato salad.

Though this did not bring the evening to a complete halt, it did dash any hopes I had with the redhead. So I'm left clueless, do I cut down on coffee, or do I find some all natural thing that makes you less wobbly? Perhaps I should just do the posh hollywood thing and check into a clinic for a few weeks of rest, and endless tweets. I suppose till I wind up on the news, having crashed my car into the gas and go, I shall keep carrying on in my usual manner.