Can we just take a moment to acknowledge that the title of the post totally lured you in? Totally. I mean, who is not frothing at the mouth trying to figure out that connection?

Enough rhetorical questions. Onto the heart of the matter.

Those of you who know me well know my pension for saying dumb shit at dumb times. A prime example of this is the Sumo Wrestling Story.

I’m at a friend’s Halloween party with a pack of my cronies. They refuse to mingle, which in my mind, is 100% anti-party. So I decided to go make  new friends; I approach a group of non-threatening looking women, all sitting with a drink in hand. My BFF is right behind me. “Hi,” I say, all sing-song-y and new-friend-like. After some awkward small talk, I realize I have to do more to break into the harem. “Can I guess what you’re all dressed up as?” They comply. I begin with the woman closest to me. She is significantly overweight. She dons a black wig with blunt bangs and a fan behind her bun. Her faux silk kimono pulls taut across her stomach. Her outfit is obvious.

“Well, this is easy. You’re a sumo wrestler.”

WHAT THE FUCK, Linsey? A SUMO WRESTLER?? Geisha, you meant GEISHA!! What is wrong with you? The one day of the year the girl gets to be someone other than her hefty self and you conjure up her every ounce of self-loathe and call her a terrible, terrible thing. To her face. In front of her friends. A huge fat Japanese man in a rolled up towel for panties. A Sumo Wrestler?!

In my horror, I attempt to talk my way out of it. To back that sumo wrestler off the mat, out of the dojo, and into a world full of just opened cherry blossom trees.

Halfway through my sincere recanting, the geisha wrestler turns to her friends and says, “Don’t you just hate it when bitches don’t know when to shut up?”

I hung my cat tail between my black tights and scurried back to friends, a huddled mass in the shadow of a tree, and found Heather, still laughing so hard that she could barely breathe and certainly not yet tell of the horror she’d just witnessed.

So yes: really inopportune stuff comes out of my mouth all of the time. This next, most recent instance is the stuff Sumo Wrestler Stories are made of. Here is how I recounted it to my friend, Gayle, via email, the day that it happened (forgive the teacher jargon):

Standing at secretary’s desk asking about materials for tomorrow’s inservice. Jeff, one VP, shouts from his office, “Is that Linsey?” I try to slink away, but slink in instead. He’s got the CTE director with him, and they are pouring over the master schedule. Jeff tells me that unlike what he had said this morning, he will not have to smoosh  my 2 AP sections into 1 because the district just called and allocated us a .2 FTE. Which means that I can have my AP classes and there is still room to open another section of 9 Honors, but they don’t know where to place it on the schedule, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Yes, I think I get the problem, I say, but I’m not sure what you’re asking me or if you are even asking me something. He says, would you be interested in teaching the 9H section. ACK!! I could feel the room getting hot and closing in on me. The men staring at me, waiting. A brand new prep one week before school starts! I explain how the woman I’d be teaming with isn’t really a teamer and would likely not be helpful in helping me get through the 1st month while I get my bearings, but that I would teach the class…but…but…and I felt as though I HAD TO TELL them, even though I had said I was going to wait until October. Didn’t I even tell you that…October?? The calendar was still on August. Dear Lord. It felt so hot in there.

So I said, Well, I feel obligated to tell you, even though this isn’t the right time–and here, dear Gayle, I provide you with a direct quote that flew from my mouth in front of two grown men, both of whom are my direct supervisors–“but in April it is highly likely that I will be shoving a baby out of my vagina.”

“shoving a baby out of my vagina.”

exact quote.

This, my dear, is what happens when we are not in control. Just tossing out mental images of my vagina and large life forms being pushed out of it to any man that might be my direct supervisor. A.W.E.S.O.M.E.

I just about died. Well, that changes things, they said. And somehow, after revising my diction choice when I sulked down the hall to tell my principal–because they said he should probably know to understand why they weren’t going to switch it all up–I managed to get my inservice copies done before I walked out the doors and FREAKED THE FUCK OUT that 1. I had spilled the beans a whole month before I intended to and 2. openly discussed MY VAGINA with the man who will write my evaluation this year and another man who I barely know. Who knows, maybe I’ll pass the new state evaluation with flying colors–I mean, if I can meet “distinguished” in a few areas AND shove something out of my vagina…I mean, what more do you really need in a teacher?

Despite my clear obstacles with not being in control, I think we are going to wait to find out. I am likely to mutter something equally as stupid when the baby is born and I find out its sex, but I will likely be naked when this happens and will, indeed, have just pushed a baby out of my vagina, and I think I will be granted a bit more leeway then.”

***

So there you have it, Friends, The Big News–it is true: I will be pushing a baby out of my vagina in April. Just in case you weren’t sure how this kind of stuff happens–out the vagina.