As a chubby, fairly unathletic child who was not popular but wanted very much to be so, there were many moments in my life that I'm sure fall on the list of "embarassing." Luckily, I do not remember these because I have become very good at repressing things.

Still, there were a few things that were either not terrible enough to completely forget or bad enough that I couldn't help but remember. One that seems to have been a repeating theme was slipping and falling in some sort of mud or puddle. The first time I remember doing this, I was dangling from a beam on the 3rd- and 4th-grade playground at my elementary school. It was a simple metal bar a couple of feet off the ground, and we used to do really exciting things like hang, swing, hang some more, etc.

This particular day, it had rained, so there was a puddle in the tanbark directly beneath the bar where kid activity had made a bit of a groove. Being non-graceful, I fell from the bar into the puddle, brown from the mud and tanbark. I was sent home to change. This happened a couple of times.

In high school, history repeated itself while I walked down the grass amphitheater on our campus one rainy day rather than taking the wiser concrete paths around. I slipped in the mud and wound up with a beautiful mud streak down my jeans. The drummer in my band drove me home to change. This happened a couple of times.

Now, I pretty much stay indoors.