Embarrassment
It’s ridiculous how small this anecdote is and yet it is by no means a small illustration of my current state. I nearly died of mortification and the annoying hilarity of it all. Come Tuesday morning, I wake to the rising Sun, children to be sent to school, yoga to be met and my finicky husband evicted in the favour of his workplace. The keyword here is finicky.
I am the nurturer in the family. I love the idea of being affectionate and chaotic. My husband, however, the provider (and the handyman!) loves his scarce few clothes and towels to smell like heaven. In an awfully humid clime of Singapore, when one goes ballistic with water-sports on a Sunday during a sea-storm with one’s entire family, I’d say, it’s a pretty tall expectation.
Let me explain! We started our voyage on a stormy Sunday afternoon, sailing around Singapore, got stuck on a picturesque island with a spot of sunshine, our bags and us, dripping wet. We got back home later in the day and did not run the laundry. Monday arrived with the same rush that it always does. We managed with spare towels that I generally stash away for guests or for kids’ school activities. We ran two loads that Monday of blistering sunshine. Tuesday, I took our towels out of the dryer and proceeded to distribute it to the family. Kids were sleepy and compliant though I could make out that faint bitter and stale odor of undried linen. Anyway, the speedboat that I am, I had already washed and stashed the spare towels away from being used again.
Finicky decided to wait out the torrential downpour on Tuesday morning before heading to his office (Oh yes, I am living the dream of a pleuviophile and a ceraunophile!) and I decided to catch some yoga before meeting the Garden of Neuro for a silent writing sprint. All went well and, miraculously, I could accomplish twenty minutes of impossible (for me) exertion without being asked a question or disturbed. But, my luck ran out when I sat down and opened the zoom link for the writing sprint. I got into the meeting, guns blazing, grinning ear to ear, hopeful for the writer-life ahead of me. I switched my video on, smiled and greeted one of the Garden Sisters and the unthinkable happened.
Man comes out of the room asking me if the towels have been washed. Mercifully, I am on mute and I reply in affirmative but not in time. He did not realise that I was in a zoom meeting with the camera on and proceeded to stuff the towel over my face asking me if I could smell anything weird. Utter and absolute mortification followed as I scrambled to turn the video off and admonish my callous husband who realised it and suddenly backed off in horror.
I am still in the writing sprint and could not think of anything better than my horrid zoom embarrassment to write about. The Garden sister who witnessed my fall from (pretended) grace must have been a seasoned woman to empathise and turn her own video off in silent understanding, “Haha! Stuff happens”. I finish this piece with a reluctant grin on my face because who, in an age of video meetings, has not been laughed at, at least once. I join that majority now as my mind brings up the terrible screenshot it took of the towel in my face and my eyes going wide with an appalled look of disbelief. All in all, my silent writing sprint did go well.