There’s a reason why I don’t like cottage cheese and most likely never will. When I was five-years old, I had one of those kitchen play stations where I could cook plastic bacon and eggs and wash my dishes in imaginary nonexistent water in the sink. My kitchen even had an oven and a fridge. In my fairytale world, I thought the fridge was real and had put a glass of real milk and real orange juice in there for me to drink the next morning. I’m sure most of you can imagine what was happening to the milk and o.j overnight. I woke up the next morning excited for my beverages. I took my milk out, and without even looking at it, took a bigger gulp than my little mouth could handle. After swallowing the curdled spoiled milk, my body went into this gag reflex mode where I ended up regurgitating my milk. With clumpy bits splattered all over our red velvet colored carpet, it took me weeks before my parents could convince me the milk they were providing was smooth and fresh.

Talk about naivety. I believed everything anyone told me, up until I was in middle school. Santa Claus was a real live person to me until I was twelve, along with the tooth fairy and the boogieman (actually, I still believe the boogieman is real). I was once told at a young age that eating crayons was good for the health, so I proceeded to devour an entire box, telling myself that the red was cherry, the purple was grape, the yellow was lemon, despite only being able to taste nothing but wax. I never felt healthier after my crayon lunch, and thus, never had an interest to eat them again.

How many licks does it take to turn a plastic beaded bracelet into Sweet Tarts candy hearts? It took me entire day of suckling to realize it would never turn into candy. I was six-years old, and it must have been a hoot for my older cousins (the ones who told me my bracelet would transform into candy hearts) to watch me lick my bracelet all day, upset that nothing was happening. At times, I thought the more furiously I licked them, the faster they would change. My mouth was exhausted at the end of the day, and I went to bed a sad camper.

I’m a grown woman (or so I think), and sometimes I believe I’m still just as gullible as I was when I was five. Just last year, I found out hiccups AREN’T caused because your heart skips a beat. How’s that for naivety, or perhaps now, the only excuse is lack of common sense.

Imagine a young girl gliding across an apparatus (blindfolded, if I may add) that stands four feet high and has a width of four inches. The blindfold comes off, and she begins a series of backward flips, sticking her landings so solid as if crazy glue were the binding product between the bottoms of her feet and the surface of the balance beam. Arms delicately swinging through the air, toes pointed, legs tight and firm, her face exudes an air of confidence, leaving her teammates in fear of what she may do next. The warm-up routine ends with a tumbling pass dismount, with one baby step to the side.

Now, imagine that same young girl frolicking about the back yard, blowing bubbles, playing tag with neighborhood friends. Suddenly, you witness her taking a faceplant into the ground. She stands up with a confuzzled look upon her face, as if to say, “what just happened?” If you were to rewind and watch the incident occur in slow motion, you will notice that the young girl tripped on a blade of uneven cut grass.

My father has always been perplexed by my extreme clumsiness, seeing how I’d started gymnastics at the age of six and was trained to have good posture, stamina, strength, and most importantly, balance. Even my teammates found it rather bizarre, the way I’d trip and fall during warm-up runs but be able to master a new tumbling pass move on my first try.

I may have been the only one on my team to have broken almost every single toe, most of them from sheer clumsiness, from falling, to tripping, to just plain old walking around the gym. If my feet had a mind of their own, they would have detached themselves from my cankles and scurried off into hiding to prevent any further toe fractures.

Perhaps I was born with clutz genes. I recall a day when my Father Bear and I were riding our bikes around the neighborhood, and going down a hill, I was anxious to get as far ahead of him as I could. Pedaling my legs as quickly as my body would allow me, careening down the sidewalk like an inebriated blind driver, I took one glance behind me for a millisecond to see if Father Bear was still was still in sight, and with no signs of him behind me, I proceeded to do an evil chuckle. As I turned my head back around, laughing maniacally, I had no time to respond to the giant tree stump that stood in front of me. As if crashing into the tree weren’t bad enough, I went flying through the air and had the misfortune of landing face first into my neighbor’s cactus plant. Luckily, the spines were not the long pointed needles but rather the dull blunted spikes that are barely raised from the cactus. Still, I came to with a sense of overwhelming agony on my face and from the multiple scrapes down my legs and elbows.

A few seconds later, my Father Bear came rushing down the path to rescue my motionless body (I was still in shock from the big fall) and rushed me into the house. As I moaned and teared up, the Mothership saw me and immediately started yelling. Not exactly the kind of reaction you’d expect from a mother seeing her five-year old daughter cut up and bleeding. She complained to me about getting scars and then told me I hurt the tree and should go out and apologize to it. Um. Splendid.

Needless to say, I have made a full recovery from the tree-crashing-face-in-cactus incident but haven’t really ridden a bike since that day. If you asked me to mount a bike right now and start riding, my fall would cause the Earth to cave in, so I’ll leave my mode of transporation to motorized vehicles for now.