On the other hand, I'm just like a baby.
On Thursday I was watching Grey's Anatomy with my friends. Then I watched the 8pm rerun last night because I was bored (can you say pathetic?). If you Tivoed it, stop reading right now, and come back here after you've seen it. I'm about to ruin it. Dr. Bailey's baby wandered into her home office while her husband was in the other room and she was at work. He tried to pull himself up using the bookshelf. Instead it toppled over, and the bookshelf + all of the books fell on top of him. It's pretty set that he is going to live (if the writer's strike ever ends that is) but he had some pretty serious injuries. While he was getting his MRI one of them said to the other "well if you'd just bolted the bookshelf to the wall..."
My mom and I moved from our house into a kick ass condo a little over two years ago. Not that I'm there all that much, school is an hour or so away, but she's a nice mom and she's tried to make it "Cheryl friendly." We live in a 4-floor walk up, so we live on the first floor. We made sure we got a model with a stall shower because I cannot lift either leg high enough to get into a tub. She painted most of the rooms with non-glossy paint so it would be easier to wipe my finger prints off the wall (not that I need to hold onto the wall, it's more a force of habit). You get the idea. All of the rooms in the condo are weird shapes so we got rid of 90% of our furniture and started over. I just happened to be home one time when the interior decorator was here. It just happened to be the day the bookshelves in my room were being picked out. I really like my bookshelves. When I remember where I put my digital camera, I'll take a picture of them. So she shows them to my mom and me online and the first thing out of my mouth was "are they going to fall on me?" You see, I hold onto furniture sometimes in addition to holding onto walls. That and when I'm about to fall my arms go out and instinctively grab on to the closest thing that is likely to stop me. I am not going to stop and think "I can't grab onto the bookshelf because if I do it is going to fall on me." No, I am going to grab onto the bookshelf. I go to the hospital to work or to have planned CP related surgeries. I do not go into the hospital through the ER.
Of course she assures me that they are very stable and of course it turns out that they are not. I don't think she had ever actually seen them in person. The handyman put them together in the kitchen and then carried them into my room. The first thing I did was test them before we put stuff on them. They wobbled. Now what are we going to do? He immediately went to the hardware store and brought back something to bolt them to the wall. He did such a great job that we can't even see where the brackets are. Now someone twice my size could fall on them and they wouldn't move and inch.
Fast forward 2 years or so. My mom finally decided to do my walk in closet so it wasn't a big cavernous hole. She decided it wasn't worth paying closet guys because, well, I'm not there very much and if she's ever going to give someone a tour of the condo, why would she ever show them my closet? So she buys a 30 something dollar thing that has poles, shelves, and even a built in shoe thing. I look at it in the box. "It's going to fall on me." Her engineer/physicist live in boyfriend spent 3 days putting it together about 2 weeks ago (I can't imagine how long it would take someone without that background to put it together). The shelves and things are adjustable heights so he made sure short me could actually reach everything. He finished and I went into the closet to test this thing. "It's defiantly going to fall on me." Whatever bolted the bookshelves to the wall won't work for this. So he figures out what he needs to use and has to go to 2 hardware stores to find it. It's bolted to the wall. I tested it. It's not so pretty looking, but it does the job. It didn't move.
Fast forward again to 2 days ago. People on TV are arguing about bolting a bookshelf to the wall in baby proofing their house. Baby vs 20 year old the first time and 22 year old the second time. Hmmm... I haven't quite figured out the words for how this makes me feel, but it bothers me. I was really uncomfortable watching it. I guess it sort of makes me feel like an insufficient grown-up person; somewhat childlike. Does that make sense? We have to "Cheryl proof" our house like people baby proof their house. But I'm very obviously not a baby...
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