Stupid Things I've Done: The Mayonnaise-on-the-Shirt Trick

I'm starting a new, hopefully recurring part of my blog today called "Stupid Things I've Done." I'm hoping that these things will be so stupid as to make you laugh, not just plain old stupid things, like the time I put a homemade pizza in the oven on a wooden rack, not thinking that wood burns and often catches on fire at high temperatures. That's not funny-stupid, it's dangerous-stupid.

Today's will be a mild example, but I think it's a good idea of what a complete imbeclie I can be. Enjoy!

Summer 1998

I was taking an English class at Le Moyne College, not having realized that I was exactly one class short to get my degree. It was the summer after what was supposed to be my senior year, and I stayed on campus for the summer to paint dorm rooms and take this one class. The class was called "Perspectives in Literature" with Dr. Novak, and to this day I would have to say it's the best class I've ever taken. It truly and sincerely changed my life. The class didn't make me smarter though, and I'll prove it.

One fateful summer day I went to class clad in jeans, a baseball cap and a white t-shirt. I don't remember what the t-shirt said on it, but like I said, it was white. The class was four hours long, and consisted of a woman with some sort of foreign accent (don't remember what kind, but I think it was German), a guy who was training to be a cop, a woman who I think worked at a grocery store, and myself. I'm no genius obviously, but I was like the ringer of this class. The class's participants were less a collection of scholars than people you would see at a defensive driving course for people who crashed into stop signs or something. I felt so bad that Dr. Novak, one of the most insightful professors I ever had, had to deal with this collection straight out of "Summer School."

Mercifully, the class was half over, so I headed down the barren staircase of Le Moyne's Grewen Hall down to the lower level where the Dolphin Den was located. The Den was the place where you could go and get pretty good, cheap food, watch some TV, play some old old video games, and sometimes study in peace. It was usually packed during the school year, but during summer, no one showed up.

Anyway, to speed things up, I ordered some sort of sandwich that had sauce on it. I think it may have been a chicken parmasean sandwich or something like that. It was delicious, I'm sure. But in the course of eating the sandwich, I -- as is my custom -- dripped some of the sauce on my shirt. My heretofore pristine, white shirt. Now, there was a huge red glob in the middle of my shirt, and I had to go back to class with it. There wasn't enough time to run back to my dorm and get a new shirt. Here I was, thinking I was the smart one in the class, and now I had a stupid stain on my shirt. I was gonna look like an idiot!

Quickly, I thought, how can I rectify this? I ran to the restroom and tried rubbing it out with a wet piece of toilet paper, but that didn't work. It just made a wet spot around the stain which further magnified it. How could I cover this up?! I've got it!

I went to a condiment station where one could pick out any of a number of items: napkins, straws, ketchup, mustard, salt, pepper. I saw my salvation; my embarrassment was to be spared by the Hellmann's company. Mayonnaise is white, I thought, and my shirt is white. White on white! It's perfect.

I went back to my table, a packet of mayonnaise and a napkin in hand, ready to undo the cruel past. I proceeded to rip open the packet of mayo, put it on a napkin, and ... wait for it... WIPE IT ON MY SHIRT. This was my brilliant solution. Hindsight being 20/20, I didn't realize two things about mayonnaise that I should have anticipated: 1) Mayo isn't really white when it's taken out of a jar or packet, it's actually closer to yellow. 2) Mayo is made of eggs and vinegar, and therefore not odorless.

Well now I snapped out of my moronic daze and realized what a fuckup I really was. I went back to class with this nasty yellowish blotch covering up a red blotch on my shirt and finished the last two hours of the class. No one said anything about the stain, but they noticed. They noticed...

This was fun.