The Blue Raja

I remembered a very embarrassing moment in my life this morning. Then I realized it’s actually a pretty funny story. My only hesitance in writing about it is that I won’t do justice to just how embarrassed I was when it happened.

My sophomore year of college I became an R.A. in a different dorm, so I didn’t know anyone I was going to be living with. I met this group of five people, who had all gone to high school together, at a volleyball game early in the semester. The next morning they invited me to go to breakfast with them, so outside of getting drunk with them the night before (I was a good RA), they really didn’t know anything about me. At breakfast we all sat at a big rectangular table, three on each side, and after our meals arrived I reached for my fork. That’s when it happened.

Have you ever seen footage of Bruce Lee’s one inch punch? He would hold his fist one inch away from an opponent’s chest. Then he would spasm his entire body and channel all of that force into the strictly forward movement of his fist. It was enough to throw an average sized man 5-10 feet away. It was so ridiculously counter-intuitive that many people refused to believe it was possible. I believe it.

As I picked up my fork, I twitched. It was a doozy. It’s a bonus from having spastic Cerebral Palsy. Every now and then a muscle or group of muscles will act on their own, and do something outrageously unexplainable.

In the twitch I also rattled my plate, which drew the attention of the entire table to the fact that my fork was airborne. It drifted. It lingered three feet above our heads for what seemed to be the painful duration of a levitra commercial. Then it gently descended to the place setting on the opposite end of the table; perfectly positioned, as if the waiter had actually wanted it there to begin with.

Silence. Not one word was uttered. After the fork stopped moving everyone at the table stared straight ahead. After a brief delay, the person at the far end of the table picked up the fork hesitantly. Flipped it over and back, inspecting it for wires or flotation devices, then moved it to his left hand. The next person took the fork, also inspecting for signs of foul play or general trickery, and finally held it up in his left hand for me to retrieve. Nothing more was said until we left the restaurant. In the parking lot the guy who had been sitting next to me walked up beside me and said:

“So dude, what the fuck was that?!”