The day I thought my ophthalmologist was leaning in to give me a hug, so I hugged him back (including the manly 3 pats on the back that say “i’m not Gay”) only to realize he was merely adjusting my headrest. that was 14 years ago.
For my wedding, I surprised my wife by singing my vows to her… I used Matthew West’s song “The Day Before You” (also performed by Rascal Flatts). Everything from the wedding was going perfect, then it came time for my vows… I grabbed the mic and the piano player started… I was balling my eyes out before I could even sing one word. I eventually made it through the song a blubbering mess (and my wife had to help me– she WASN’T crying). Now everytime they get a chance, my buddies like to remind me of it. That was only 5 years ago, but I’m sure it will live on.
I forgot to mention that about a year later, I got a chance to talk to Matthew West and I told him my story… Turns out he wrote it for his wife to sing on their wedding day but he had to have a friend sing it because he didn’t think he would be able to make it through.
When I was around 12, I was in massachusetts with my worship team and we were staying at someones house. They had a little dog, a pugg (I believe). I was sitting on the sofa and the dog jumps up, and gets on my leg and I throw my hands up and my head back and start saying “don’t lick my face, don’t lick my face”. That comes up WHENEVER I’m with that group of people. I turn 24 in May.
I have a problem with falling… and my friends and family love it.
Moments:
1) Running with my eyes closed (so I could envision the finish line, which makes it easier to run)… and crashing into a mailbox. 13 years ago.
2) Falling into a hole while I was walking backward. 12 years ago.
3) Falling off a cliff ish thing (only 9 feet because it was tiered farming or whatever it’s called) because I was taking a step backward. 7 years ago.
4) Falling down a hill at Sea World… because I was racing my sister. Down the hill. 4 years ago.
I was about 6 and like every 6 year old boy, I had a pair of KICKIN’ cowboy boots. I wore those things everywhere. Me and my cousins, all 12 of us, were at my Grandparents house, and we all decided to head down to the basement and cause the usual ruckus. On my way down, about the 2nd step, my boots decided they would SLIDE the rest of the way down. It was as if I was riding a sled down the stairs. I landed on my feet, magically, but yeah… Every time me and my cousins get together, it’s brought up without fail.
I read the article… Even though you won a beauty pageant, everything sounds basically manly except for the “What I Look Best In” category. Oh, and negative points if your answer to the Judges’ question involved “world peace” in any way.
Seriously, though, congrats on being crowned Mr. Berry ’94-’95.
After I graduated from college myself and 4 friends went camping on the beach down in SC. Well we started a fire to make dinner and I was standing a little too close to the fire and it started to get real hot and coupled with my low pain tolerance I said “Ow, it’s burning me.” However, I apparently said “Ow, burn me. Burn me”. Gets brought every time whenever there’s something that relates to fire haha
Um, it’s not my friends, but my mom always likes to remind people how as a kid I wrote President Reagan and told him all he needed to know about Qaddafi (I was a strange child). I then said he could come to my treehouse and make plans if he needed to. Yup, I’m a grown adult and have accomplished a lot, and experienced a ton, but that’s forever stuck in mom’s mind.
*sigh* my 21st bday…i got in a fight w/ the driveway and the driveway won.
at the end of the night out on the town to celebrate being of legal drinking age, my roommate drove us home…i have been told that when i attempted to get out of the car, my feet never touched the ground…my face hit first….and broke two of my top teeth…exposed nerves and all. Two root canals, two porcelain crowns, and 11 yrs later…yeah…i still hear about it
State basketball tournament, March 1993. I was a junior that year. Wasn’t a great player, but I was the first one off the bench and worked like mad to get to that point. I was fouled while shooting and was taking two free throws. I had free throw issues all year, and this would turn out to be no different. I stepped up to the line, went through my same routine (which I still do sometimes), lined it up and …. missed everything. I bet it came up two feet short. The next free throw I clanged off the backboard, barely hitting the rim at all. I got yelled at by the coach. Yelled at a lot. Something about how this was state tournament and we’re still airballing free throws. Good times.
Our neighbor decided to pick an argument with my husband in front of our friends. I’m not sure what overcame me, but I got in between them and started chewing out the neighbor. NEVER done that before or since. The best/worst part was that I was barefoot, pregnant, and had a baby on my hip. Our friends later commented that, “I couldn’t have been more cliche If I tried…”
I will try and make this real short. When I was a senior in high school I was playing Taboo with a bunch of friends, and a word came up that I didn’t know, and just skipped it. After the round they asked me what the card I skipped was. It was Yacht. Knowing what a yacht is, I told them that I thought it said ya-ch-t. Pronouncing the ch. To this day, I still get ya-ch-t comments. 10 years later.
Okay, the picture freaked me out. I’ve been a subscriber of your blog for a while now and never knew that you went to Berry. (small world moment – I was Grant Magness’ youth minister at one time) Awesome post.
I am just generally know as being a klutz. I have always been a klutz. Not even ballet classes as a child helped (and THAT is what I am always reminded of). I am the dork who will lean WAY too far forward looking out a closed window or into a tank at an aquarium and whack my head on the glass. If there is a floor to be slipped on, I am the one who will slide on it (did it yesterday while out and this morning on my kitchen floor – and I still don’t know how). I bark my knuckles on the bottom of every kitchen cabinet I have the misfortune to reach under and my head on anything that gets above it. When you hear, “Way to go, Grace!” Chances are they are not actually cheering Grace on, but likely watching Kathryne do something really smooth. I totally own it, too!
No specific moment, but so many goofy ones that I am NOTORIOUS!
I consider my klutz skills as a gift from God: He, in His awesome wisdom, He knew that someone with solid self-esteem needs to be a klutz because it makes other people feel better and more relaxed. I’m the gal who will slip, fall, and spill something, who always sits at the table leg and bangs my knee into it, and the one person ever who quietly cut into a pepper just as the lunch speaker looked my way: a pepper that shot a spout of juice 18″ into the air. That’s a special calling, my friend: celebrate it!
Once while leading worship I said, “can we just lift up a clap of praise?”, only I didn’t say “clap”. I said “crap”. Not once, but twice. Not allowed to forget that brilliance
When I was in college, we were on a leadership retreat and I had a stomach ache. I got diarrhea and clogged up the toilet at the lake house we were staying at. then I tried to flush the toilet again and it over flowed and continued to over flow. Then I couldn’t get the water to turn off so it continues to flow out the door and into the next room. There was water and lettuce floating all around the upstairs. My friend still refers to it as the night I became “the Salad Shooter”. Also, 2 of my closest friends cleaned it up for me b/c I was too sick to do it. Love those 2 men, I am forever indebted to them.
My family has a whole list of my personal “Faux pas” (pronounced ‘fox paz’) that are words I’ve read/said wrong, hence the title. The two most repeated are…..
“My head hurts so bad I feel like I got hit with a mullet.”
I can’t think of anything for me offhand, but there’s a story I love to tell about my sister. She and I had gone to a water park that day with a group of friends, and we all ended up back at our house that night. We decided to watch a movie, so my sister (I think she was a fairly new driver at this point) was going to go rent a movie quick. The video place in town was less than five minutes away, so when she had been gone over an hour we were getting really concerned. This was before we had cell phones, and my dad was just getting his keys to go look for her when she walked in the door. She was going to a different video store in a nearby town, and she got confused where she was going. She took a right instead of a left, and went to the completely wrong town, totally oblivious, even though we’d lived there since she was 2.
Carlos, I love that you have the cliche “I can’t believe I won” look in the pic. Congrats.
As a kid, I would repeatedly lock myself in the restroom in orser to play with my Mom’s make-up. This one time while locked in there, I discovered a new object! I could have swore I hit gold. I experimented on my arm, and after success, curiously moved on to my face. Turns out shavers do as they were made to do, shave. I was horrified when I saw that I was missing an eyebrow! (yes, a whole entire eyebrow.) I was mortified when my parents still made me attend school! I had a small bandaid in substitution of my brow. I cried and cried when the nurse refused to continue to give me my daily bandaid dosage.
It was horrible and a bit tromitizing. I will forever be reminded of the my most horrible years. Just incase you didn’t know, 3rd graders are cruel beyond belief.
During practice before a worship set we we’re joking around saying o chappy day because I we we’re doing o happy day and I wa complaining my lips were Chapped. So we start into happy day and I say let’s sing this out and I sing “oh Chappy Day !!”
Still to this day everytime that song is in the set Im made sure I remeber that I said o chappy day haha
Dinner theater. Boyne Highlands in northern Michigan. Summer of 2000. During a number I hopped off the stage to go to the other side…and landed right on a mic stand. No mic. Broke the clip on my ‘taint’. The next day my man parts were purpleish-black and about the size of a grapefruit.
The time I knocked myself out running into a tree when I was 18. Not by driving into it…this was no auto accident. I literally, on foot, RAN into the one and only tree in my parents’ front yard. I was getting the mail from the mailbox and returning to the house, then suddenly, I was waking up on the ground checking to make sure my teeth were all still there. I stumbled to the house, where my little brother was the only one home. He got over his shock at seeing his sister’s face mangled and dripping blood and called a doctor friend to come take care of me.
The doctor got me in right away with a plastic surgeon friend to stitch me up so my face wouldn’t scar.
Walking into church that Sunday with antibacterial goop on my shredded face was embarrassing. I looked like I was wearing a Halloween mask. I will never forget the kindness of the one friend who didn’t laugh at me.
That was 11 years ago, and I still hear about it from friends and family alike.
I was in the 11th grade, playing basketball outside like we did almost every day during the summer. It was about a million degrees and I was on a fast break about to go Jordon on James Geter. All of a sudden I loose control of the ball in mid-air and panic thinking I’m going to miss the dunk and I forget to grab the rim. I must have been going pretty fast because when my arms hit the rim, it turned me sideways and I fell from grace on my side. Then…I bounced, apparently pretty high and hit the ground again.
Luckily it just knocked the wind out of me, but as soon as everyone knew I wasn’t dead I had 30 of my “friends” start clowning me. It still comes up to this day.
RAIN IT DOWN
The day I thought my ophthalmologist was leaning in to give me a hug, so I hugged him back (including the manly 3 pats on the back that say “i’m not Gay”) only to realize he was merely adjusting my headrest. that was 14 years ago.
I’ve done this.
I feel your pain.
Haha, that made my day. That is too funny.
For my wedding, I surprised my wife by singing my vows to her… I used Matthew West’s song “The Day Before You” (also performed by Rascal Flatts). Everything from the wedding was going perfect, then it came time for my vows… I grabbed the mic and the piano player started… I was balling my eyes out before I could even sing one word. I eventually made it through the song a blubbering mess (and my wife had to help me– she WASN’T crying). Now everytime they get a chance, my buddies like to remind me of it. That was only 5 years ago, but I’m sure it will live on.
I forgot to mention that about a year later, I got a chance to talk to Matthew West and I told him my story… Turns out he wrote it for his wife to sing on their wedding day but he had to have a friend sing it because he didn’t think he would be able to make it through.
When I was about 8 I ran around wearing a bra and some underwear on my head, some superhero thing I think. I still hear about it today from family.
When I was around 12, I was in massachusetts with my worship team and we were staying at someones house. They had a little dog, a pugg (I believe). I was sitting on the sofa and the dog jumps up, and gets on my leg and I throw my hands up and my head back and start saying “don’t lick my face, don’t lick my face”. That comes up WHENEVER I’m with that group of people. I turn 24 in May.
I have a problem with falling… and my friends and family love it.
Moments:
1) Running with my eyes closed (so I could envision the finish line, which makes it easier to run)… and crashing into a mailbox. 13 years ago.
2) Falling into a hole while I was walking backward. 12 years ago.
3) Falling off a cliff ish thing (only 9 feet because it was tiered farming or whatever it’s called) because I was taking a step backward. 7 years ago.
4) Falling down a hill at Sea World… because I was racing my sister. Down the hill. 4 years ago.
They. never. stop. remembering.
So wait…. Mr. Berry?…. Is that, like, a BEAUTY PAGEANT for dudes?!?!
….Wow.
I was about 6 and like every 6 year old boy, I had a pair of KICKIN’ cowboy boots. I wore those things everywhere. Me and my cousins, all 12 of us, were at my Grandparents house, and we all decided to head down to the basement and cause the usual ruckus. On my way down, about the 2nd step, my boots decided they would SLIDE the rest of the way down. It was as if I was riding a sled down the stairs. I landed on my feet, magically, but yeah… Every time me and my cousins get together, it’s brought up without fail.
I think the last lines in your article are best “‘I was shocked,’ Whittaker said, ‘I love everybody.’”
Totally something you would say.
Scratch that…my favorite part is the picture.
I thought the exact same thing!
I read the article… Even though you won a beauty pageant, everything sounds basically manly except for the “What I Look Best In” category. Oh, and negative points if your answer to the Judges’ question involved “world peace” in any way.
Seriously, though, congrats on being crowned Mr. Berry ’94-’95.
After I graduated from college myself and 4 friends went camping on the beach down in SC. Well we started a fire to make dinner and I was standing a little too close to the fire and it started to get real hot and coupled with my low pain tolerance I said “Ow, it’s burning me.” However, I apparently said “Ow, burn me. Burn me”. Gets brought every time whenever there’s something that relates to fire haha
Um, it’s not my friends, but my mom always likes to remind people how as a kid I wrote President Reagan and told him all he needed to know about Qaddafi (I was a strange child). I then said he could come to my treehouse and make plans if he needed to. Yup, I’m a grown adult and have accomplished a lot, and experienced a ton, but that’s forever stuck in mom’s mind.
*sigh* my 21st bday…i got in a fight w/ the driveway and the driveway won.
at the end of the night out on the town to celebrate being of legal drinking age, my roommate drove us home…i have been told that when i attempted to get out of the car, my feet never touched the ground…my face hit first….and broke two of my top teeth…exposed nerves and all. Two root canals, two porcelain crowns, and 11 yrs later…yeah…i still hear about it
oh, and i’m reminded of it every time i go to the dentist and they ask “so how long have you had these crowns?”
State basketball tournament, March 1993. I was a junior that year. Wasn’t a great player, but I was the first one off the bench and worked like mad to get to that point. I was fouled while shooting and was taking two free throws. I had free throw issues all year, and this would turn out to be no different. I stepped up to the line, went through my same routine (which I still do sometimes), lined it up and …. missed everything. I bet it came up two feet short. The next free throw I clanged off the backboard, barely hitting the rim at all. I got yelled at by the coach. Yelled at a lot. Something about how this was state tournament and we’re still airballing free throws. Good times.
Our neighbor decided to pick an argument with my husband in front of our friends. I’m not sure what overcame me, but I got in between them and started chewing out the neighbor. NEVER done that before or since. The best/worst part was that I was barefoot, pregnant, and had a baby on my hip. Our friends later commented that, “I couldn’t have been more cliche If I tried…”
Omg
I will try and make this real short. When I was a senior in high school I was playing Taboo with a bunch of friends, and a word came up that I didn’t know, and just skipped it. After the round they asked me what the card I skipped was. It was Yacht. Knowing what a yacht is, I told them that I thought it said ya-ch-t. Pronouncing the ch. To this day, I still get ya-ch-t comments. 10 years later.
Okay, the picture freaked me out. I’ve been a subscriber of your blog for a while now and never knew that you went to Berry. (small world moment – I was Grant Magness’ youth minister at one time) Awesome post.
I am just generally know as being a klutz. I have always been a klutz. Not even ballet classes as a child helped (and THAT is what I am always reminded of). I am the dork who will lean WAY too far forward looking out a closed window or into a tank at an aquarium and whack my head on the glass. If there is a floor to be slipped on, I am the one who will slide on it (did it yesterday while out and this morning on my kitchen floor – and I still don’t know how). I bark my knuckles on the bottom of every kitchen cabinet I have the misfortune to reach under and my head on anything that gets above it. When you hear, “Way to go, Grace!” Chances are they are not actually cheering Grace on, but likely watching Kathryne do something really smooth.
I totally own it, too!
No specific moment, but so many goofy ones that I am NOTORIOUS!
I consider my klutz skills as a gift from God: He, in His awesome wisdom, He knew that someone with solid self-esteem needs to be a klutz because it makes other people feel better and more relaxed. I’m the gal who will slip, fall, and spill something, who always sits at the table leg and bangs my knee into it, and the one person ever who quietly cut into a pepper just as the lunch speaker looked my way: a pepper that shot a spout of juice 18″ into the air. That’s a special calling, my friend: celebrate it!
Once while leading worship I said, “can we just lift up a clap of praise?”, only I didn’t say “clap”. I said “crap”. Not once, but twice. Not allowed to forget that brilliance
I wanna make fun of you for “can we just lift up a clap of praise”!
“Crap of plaise” is what I blurted into the mic, reverberating throughout the holy house of God. Not once, but twice. Lord have mercy.
X2 I thought that was the joke at first..
When I was in college, we were on a leadership retreat and I had a stomach ache. I got diarrhea and clogged up the toilet at the lake house we were staying at. then I tried to flush the toilet again and it over flowed and continued to over flow. Then I couldn’t get the water to turn off so it continues to flow out the door and into the next room. There was water and lettuce floating all around the upstairs. My friend still refers to it as the night I became “the Salad Shooter”. Also, 2 of my closest friends cleaned it up for me b/c I was too sick to do it. Love those 2 men, I am forever indebted to them.
My family has a whole list of my personal “Faux pas” (pronounced ‘fox paz’) that are words I’ve read/said wrong, hence the title. The two most repeated are…..
“My head hurts so bad I feel like I got hit with a mullet.”
“Oooh, hors d’oeuvre.” (pronounced Hor’s de’vors.)
I took dance for a while in high school. So what.
http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com/2009/10/24/balancing-act/
too funny!
I can’t think of anything for me offhand, but there’s a story I love to tell about my sister. She and I had gone to a water park that day with a group of friends, and we all ended up back at our house that night. We decided to watch a movie, so my sister (I think she was a fairly new driver at this point) was going to go rent a movie quick. The video place in town was less than five minutes away, so when she had been gone over an hour we were getting really concerned. This was before we had cell phones, and my dad was just getting his keys to go look for her when she walked in the door. She was going to a different video store in a nearby town, and she got confused where she was going. She took a right instead of a left, and went to the completely wrong town, totally oblivious, even though we’d lived there since she was 2.
Carlos, I love that you have the cliche “I can’t believe I won” look in the pic. Congrats.
Might I just say, the picture for the rape defense class… is truly horrifying.
Actually, I think the picture goes with “Godspell” on the other side of the banner.
When I was about 5 I got my head stuck in the iron railing in the front of our house. It took my dad and my neighbor to get me out.
Two comments.
1 – “I was shocked, I love everybody” made me literally laugh out loud. And continued.
2 – What did you do for Berry? Did you make good on your essay?
As a kid, I would repeatedly lock myself in the restroom in orser to play with my Mom’s make-up. This one time while locked in there, I discovered a new object! I could have swore I hit gold. I experimented on my arm, and after success, curiously moved on to my face. Turns out shavers do as they were made to do, shave. I was horrified when I saw that I was missing an eyebrow! (yes, a whole entire eyebrow.) I was mortified when my parents still made me attend school! I had a small bandaid in substitution of my brow. I cried and cried when the nurse refused to continue to give me my daily bandaid dosage.
It was horrible and a bit tromitizing. I will forever be reminded of the my most horrible years. Just incase you didn’t know, 3rd graders are cruel beyond belief.
During practice before a worship set we we’re joking around saying o chappy day because I we we’re doing o happy day and I wa complaining my lips were Chapped. So we start into happy day and I say let’s sing this out and I sing “oh Chappy Day !!”
Still to this day everytime that song is in the set Im made sure I remeber that I said o chappy day haha
Dinner theater. Boyne Highlands in northern Michigan. Summer of 2000. During a number I hopped off the stage to go to the other side…and landed right on a mic stand. No mic. Broke the clip on my ‘taint’. The next day my man parts were purpleish-black and about the size of a grapefruit.
Family, friends…yeah…they still bring it up.
The time I knocked myself out running into a tree when I was 18. Not by driving into it…this was no auto accident. I literally, on foot, RAN into the one and only tree in my parents’ front yard. I was getting the mail from the mailbox and returning to the house, then suddenly, I was waking up on the ground checking to make sure my teeth were all still there. I stumbled to the house, where my little brother was the only one home. He got over his shock at seeing his sister’s face mangled and dripping blood and called a doctor friend to come take care of me.
The doctor got me in right away with a plastic surgeon friend to stitch me up so my face wouldn’t scar.
Walking into church that Sunday with antibacterial goop on my shredded face was embarrassing. I looked like I was wearing a Halloween mask. I will never forget the kindness of the one friend who didn’t laugh at me.
That was 11 years ago, and I still hear about it from friends and family alike.
So, your talent, Los, was the dramatic poetry reading?
In one of the greatest playground accidents ever…
I was in the 11th grade, playing basketball outside like we did almost every day during the summer. It was about a million degrees and I was on a fast break about to go Jordon on James Geter. All of a sudden I loose control of the ball in mid-air and panic thinking I’m going to miss the dunk and I forget to grab the rim. I must have been going pretty fast because when my arms hit the rim, it turned me sideways and I fell from grace on my side. Then…I bounced, apparently pretty high and hit the ground again.
Luckily it just knocked the wind out of me, but as soon as everyone knew I wasn’t dead I had 30 of my “friends” start clowning me. It still comes up to this day.
SK
Bahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaahaha!!!!!!!!!!! Hahahahahahahhaha. Whew.
P.S. You were much skinnier then.
P.P.S. They are about to tear down Richards. How’s that for making you feel old??
Wonder what ever happened to freshman Lauren Hicks who was riding her bike past the Richards Gym in the other front page story?