It’s the holidays and spirits are aflutter.  Everything is merry and heightened.  Hackneyed Christmas observers say that during (or on) Christmas, anything is possible.  Contextually, I believe these Christmas observers mean “miracles,” but other wondrous acts of marvel happen every single day.  And it’s difficult to describe those acts as miracles, especially if they’re less like miracles and more like debacles.

Last night, I experienced a debacle: I flushed my own sock down my own toilet. I’m stating my “own” toilet to emphasize that the situation could have been worse, like I could have flushed my sock down “a toilet at Coffee Bean” or something (or probably not, actually). After it happened, now referred to as “The Great Sock-Flushing Incident of Christmas 2011”, I screamed out loud. In fact, I screamed so loud that when I ran out of the bathroom to tell my sister what had happened, she asked me if that “girl screaming” was me.

Now, I’m sure most of you are thinking – how is that even possible? And you guys are absolutely right to think that, because flushing one’s own sock down one’s own toilet is the equivalent of being on a serious farcical, metaphorical ‘shroom trip.  It’s crazy. Then again, so am I, so it’s not so far-fetched. The craziest thing about the sock flushing was that it all happened so fast (like most traumas).

As I do in the restroom, I engaged myself in some light restroom reading. Midway into Edith Wharton’s  The House of Mirth, I stood up to flush the facility and as I was doing so, I simultaneously removed my sock. With one quick, ambidextrous stroke, I managed to flip my sock off into the air with great velocity and as the facility water swirled downward (into a pragmatic downward spiral off to some faraway toilet land), my sock projectile-flew into the toilet and swirled down with the water all at once!

It happened so quickly that I didn’t have time to reach into the toilet and grab the sock out. Immediately, thoughts of plumbers and plungers and sock removal flooded my cranium. And the feeling of SHAME washed over me – and not in that sexy full-frontal, Michael Fassbender kinda way. I felt genuine shame and embarrassment. How could I be so clumsy and clutsy and absurd? Who am I, Lucy Ricardo? Who flushes their own sock down their own toilet? Consulting with my sister, she said to just “let the sock go”, so that’s what I did.

Still, I’m plagued by the feeling that I should check myself into Life Rehab for people who do egregiously ridiculous things, like flushing their own socks down toilets.  In Life Rehab, I have high hopes that I could learn how to be normal and functional, living as non-mortifying member of society. If I’m really being honest with myself, I know it’s just a sock and not like-a blow dryer or something, but still-the situation felt so absurd.

As my fictional Life Rehab counselors would encourage me to do (in fictitious Life Rehab), being honest is paramount to recovery.  So in the spirit of full honesty, I feel as though I also must disclose that it wasn’t in fact my sock that I flushed down the toilet but my sister’s red, bejeweled, Christmas sock (that I had borrowed earlier that morning).  So I’ve officially sunk to new lows today. Voluntarily, I will be checking myself into an imaginary Life Rehab so I can learn how to act like a normal human being, especially around the holidays.  Merry Christmas!