Human Canon Ball - a game with No Winners

So, today I turn thirty-seven! Whoo hoo! Anyhoo - upon reaching this momentous milestone, I have been forced me to reflect on my life and share with you some precious nuggets of wisdom I have learnt so far. Sure the list of things I’ve learnt is long Harry Potter-style-six-volume grocery I take down to Woolies before Christmas, but I have narrowed it down to five top, and here goes:

1)      Never mix alcohol with antibiotics – you’re feeling crap anyways if you’re using antibiotics and it is perfectly possible to feel worse.

2)   The Poodle perm was not attractive in the 1980s, 1990s and never mind what that ultra-cool hairdresser says – it is still not attractive. Nobody except 1980s Kylie as Charlene can pull it off.

3)   Date nerds; they end up being the bosses of the jocks and earn more.

4)   A girl with E-cup boobs can never wear a strapless  dress without the whole thing ending in tears. Accept it. Move on.

5)   NEVER EVER PLAY HUMAN CANNON BALL. If a god meant us to fly – he’d have given us wings goddamit!

I really wish I had listened to No. 5. I really do. I really wish I could get into a Delorean-style time machine and zap myself back in time to the morning of my seventh birthday.

See, a the day before my before, my brother and I had watched American’s Greatest Hero. This superhero was the least likely of superheros as he was completely gauche and not very smart. And he was forever flying into things and had the best misadventures. My brother and I loved him of course!

My brother, was also bit on the nerdy side complete with horn-rimmed glassed and a wheezy laugh, was desperate to re-enact the whole flying thingy. And I was more than happy to humour him. After all he’d bought me a plastic cooking set for my birthday with his allowance and he’d convinced me I owed him.

So while our mother was busy preparing for my birthday bash, my brother and I sneaked off into the guest room  and set the mattresses up for this feat of flying. First we jumped off the bed for a good ten minutes and that started to pale. Then we jumped off the dresser. We just weren’t getting the height. We were convinced we could fly if we could just get up in the air enough.

Come in Human Canon Ball  - my brother convinced me to stand on the soles of his feet while he was lying on the ground with his legs bent up in the air. The plan was that he’d propel me up in the air with the action of his legs and I would fly into the sky through the open window.

Needless to say, I didn’t fly out the window – thank god cause we lived on the tenth floor of our apartment block – but I did fall badly, cracking my head and nose on the reinforced concrete walls. But worst of all, or so we thought at the time, I’d landed on my brother’s glasses breaking the horn-rimmed frame to good effect.

Mum was too busy to give us a good tongue lashing that day, but she certainly didn’t spare us the next. She was so mad at us that I didn’t have the guts to tell her that my nose hurt like hell and that it had bled for a good ten minutes. A fact we’d managed to keep from her by hiding in the bathroom.

By the time I was fourteen, it was blatantly clear that  my nose was hooked and bent out of shape. In teenage angst and lack of funds, there was no option to have it fixed. Until earlier this year when a visit to the GP identified that my previously broken nose was probably the source of migraines I suffer on a regular basis.

Sure I don’t need the surgery, and a part of me is totally embarrassed about having a nose job done at thirty-seven. I mean, surely it’s the height of vanity. I have lived with my crooked nose for thirty-years already, another forty or fifty won’t kill me.  Yes, it’s for medical reasons but I must confess feeling a little joyous at the thought of not having a hooked nose any more. So, for my thirty-seventh birthday – my gift to myself is rhinoplasty.

Am I being vain? Have you had any plastic surgery? And how have your siblings scared you for life?