trust falls: who needs them?

i like the geico gecko commercials. i particularly like the one i've included in this post. the gecko's a pretty entertaining chap with his british accent and all, but check out the jackson pollock painting on the wall. i'm a sucker for that kind of stuff. the funniest part, though, is the end when the boss is falling back... the look on the gecko... the "oh, dear" line makes me laugh every time. i actually stop skipping through the commercials during a dvr'd show just to watch this one. you should, too.

thing is, i've had an experience with trust falls... a bad experience. maybe that's why i don't trust anyone. it happened in utah at a place called aspen grove. the greater cooper family, back before the other four of the cooperfive existed (well, at least three of them) used to make its way up provo canyon every summer, just above sundance, to participate in this family camp stuff as one of our annual vacations. it was kind of like that camp in the movie dirty dancing except that there wasn't much dancing, much less dirty dancing, or patrick swayze.

nonetheless, we seemed to have the time of our lives at aspen grove... except for that one summer when everyone got the runs because of some food poisoning issue. that was miserable. then there was a summer i got a stick stuck in my leg after crashing into a tree stump while running down a mountain. that wasn't so great either. and how can i forget the summer my grandma was eaten by an emaciated mountain lion? ok, that's a lie. but you get the picture, while aspen grove was fun, it could be somewhat of a health risk at times.

take for instance the summer of the trust fall gone wrong. while at aspen grove, you get split up into groups of kids roughly your same age. then you spend every day of the week with these kids. on a side note, it was always more fun when there were some really "fine" chicks in our group (that was the kind of jargon we used back then), but we usually had to take what we could get. i'm just saying. once the groups were set and the chicks were evaluated, my pre-pubescent cohorts and i would spend the rest of the week competing/vying for the attention of the lovely ladies who were just as stuck with us as we were with them.

first off, i don't remember the specifics of the summer of the failed trust fall, but i'm sure there was someone i was trying to impress. secondly, it hurt... the trust fall, that is, not my efforts to impress. thirdly, my trust fall experience was slightly worse than the gecko's in the commercial since not only was i the fallor, but i fell from an elevated height of like 3 or 4 feet... so it was quite a drop. unfortunately, a group of my peers, in whom i was supposed to trust... and if i didn't trust them, in whom i was supposed to develop the type of trust that can only be forged in the magical realm of provo canyon via a trust fall, decided to take my turn off and didn't catch me as i fell back onto a bed of nails. ok, there were no nails, but there were rocks and hard dirt. it hurt.

in fact, it hurt so bad that i started to cry and i'm not the crying because of pain type. now that i think about it, i seem to remember having had a crush on our group leader. she was a college student. i think i dramatized the tears a little to get her attention, so she would tend to my wounds. and now that i think a little bit more about it, i think that was the same summer i got a stick stuck in my leg upon running down a hill, losing control and slamming into a tree stump (for the record, i didn't cry when that happened). i think the same group leader was there to help me through that whole ordeal, as well (i wouldn't have had it any other way). the lengths i will go to just to get a little attention (like author over a hundred blog posts on the world wide web).

the leg thing was cool because i had a stick sticking out my leg until i got the hospital. it left a pretty good gash in my shin... just ask if you'd like to see the scar sometime. the doctor stuck this tube in my leg that leaked out some fluid stuff occassionally... it was crazy. i felt kind of like something from the x-files even though this was well before the x-files.

i wasn't supposed to walk around on it after that, so that was kind of lame. but, someone bought me some model airplane stuff that i could work on in the cabin loft... which is where i would dwell in those days. that was cool until i stabbed my left index finger pretty good with the exacto knife. luckily, it was a pretty clean jab... a through-and-through as they would say in csi-speak. it left an ok scar and a numb spot on my finger that i also don't mind showing you if you ask.

i remember being stuck up in the loft one night and having to use the restroom really badly. like i said, i wasn't supposed to walk on my leg and everyone was asleep, so i couldn't get any help to get down from the loft... i was stuck (note to readers: if you are immobilized, don't sleep in a loft). luckily, i was close to the loft's window which i was able to open in order to relieve myself (no, that wasn't the food poisoning year, too). as far as i could tell, the coast was clear and no one received a golden shower. i have to admit that it was quick thinking on my part, but going forward i quit drinking so much water before bed.

the moral of the story is that none of my efforts to get some attention really got me anywhere with the ladies. maybe it was because they had no taste in men and maybe it was because i was a lerpy kid? probably both. maybe the crying turned them off? either way, i'm never doing a trust fall again.

oh dear.