The Tofu-tastrophe

There are several things in life for which you can consistently count on me: shopping for clothes literally once in a blue moon; starting all my sentences with, "I heard this story on NPR..."; and tacking "-tastrophe" onto every noun known to man. Today's tastrophe might be, with the exception of my Orcas Island [cat]astrophe this past July, my favorite.

I was packing my lunch this morning and decided to take a few pieces of the tofu my mom cooked for dinner a couple nights ago. It had been delicious--heavy and soggy with soy sauce and garlic and ginger--and when she put it away she'd wrapped it loosely in a piece of plastic. Deciding I didn't need any further packaging to transport the marinated soy product to work in my bag, I dumped it in amongst my wallet and water bottle and notepad and Burt's Bees lip balm and walked jauntily out the door.  

Lunchtime came, and I found I wasn't nearly as hungry as I'd expected to be. I ate my yogurt and figured I'd take the tofu home for a mid-afternoon snack. (Because I'm the kind of person who eats tofu as a mid-afternoon snack.)

My "Olivia, you freaking idiot" moment didn't come until the ride home. We'd just passed through Kenmore and the bus had emptied out considerably, as it always does by the Kenmore P&R. About that time, I began to smell a distinct sickly sweet odor wafting under my nose. It took me close to four minutes to realize the stench was coming from me. I got a knot in my stomach and lifted my bag off my thigh to discover a huge brown stain both on the bag's tan canvas and on my pants. My immediate thought, that I could easily pass it off as a coffee spill if anyone asked (because in my paranoid mind I envisioned cars pulling over on the walk home to comment on my unseemly stain) was quickly disregarded due to the fact that while soy sauce may resemble coffee in appearance, it does not, in fact, resemble it in aroma. At this point the mostly empty bus was both a blessing and a curse: a blessing because there were only a few people around to smell me, and they were sitting in the back; a curse because since there were very few people around to smell me, there was no doubt I was the one who smelled.

To my delight, when I departed the bus I discovered that my peacoat covered a good 1/8 of the stain, the diameter of which was probably around four inches. (Note: I just measured. Five inches.) Feeling proud of myself that I'd thought to wear a long jacket on the day I would demonstrate exactly how incompetent I really am in public, and cocky that I'd managed to trick the rest of the world into believing that my stain was 1/8 smaller than it really was, I began the trek homeward. 

There are very few things in this world I do better than making an awkward situation more awkward, so as I strutted across the overpass and freeway entrance and down my residential street, I insisted on simultaneously listening to a hilarious episode of Wait Wait and texting my cousin who had recently informed me that she thought our grandma had confused our baby pictures. I have included two photos of me and my cousin in our younger years. You will notice that it would be very difficult--nay, impossible--to confuse us, as small children or as adults. The result of this text, and of the podcast, was frequent and extremely audible laughter as I walked down the street. Because whenever the opportunity arises for me to present myself as even more of a freak than I am, of course I seize it. So there I was, a soy sauce-reeking, stained-denim-wearing, podcast-listening, texting, cackling fool marching my way up the driveway. 

I changed my pants, but my leg still smells like Asian food. Time for a shower.