Prosthetic Legs and Tiger Cubs.

I've never been an especially good recipient of practical jokes.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I react pretty negatively when someone pulls a prank on me.

(My poor roommate learned this the hard way. I went completely ballistic on her a couple months ago because of a simple prank. But that's another story.)

For as long as I can remember, my parents have been heavily involved in medical missions in Haiti. Their mission work has impacted my life in a variety of ways over the years, but this was a manifestation of missions that I never would've predicted.

See, medical missions are unique in that the donations we receive can be quite--ah--unnerving.

You know, things like catheters, syringes…

And prosthetic legs.

Yes, prosthetic legs: the most threatening of all the medical supplies. The king of scariness. The archduke of gross.

For several years, we stored donations exclusively in my parents' garage. Every single day during this era, I was forced to walk dangerously close to these abominable appendages as I entered and exited my parents' house. And every single day, I got increasingly jittery as a direct result of their presence in my life.

One night, my dad had picked me up from whatever school or church activity I'd been at that day, and on the way home he made me promise that I'd have a good attitude about (as he put it) "whatever might happen." I reluctantly agreed to make that promise, but I wasn't thrilled about his secrecy surrounding this ambiguous phrase.

When we got home, I entered the house like a baby tiger ready to prey on his dinner. Though I wasn't sure quite what to expect, I wasn't about to let this vague "whatever might happen" make a fool of me.

My stint as a hungry tiger cub ended relatively quickly, as I determined that nothing was amiss in my parents' house that night.

Until I went to bed.

I walked down the long hallway that leads to my bedroom, as I'd done countless times before. As I neared the doorway, I looked into the bedroom and saw the one thing on the planet that I wanted to see less than anything else:

legs.

Two bacteria-infested, sin-laden, gag-reflex-inducing, repulsive legs were sticking out from underneath my bed.

I screamed loudly enough to have alerted the man in the moon of my fright, and my tiger-like instincts shifted quickly from "fight" to "flight". I ran like the wind down the stairs and to the opposite end of the house. I had to get far, far away from those monsters that were laying under my bed in all their disdainful glory.

And my dear sweet mother just stood there and watched, laughing hysterically as though Bill Cosby had just performed his bit about Froofie the Dog.

Could she not perceive my anguish?!

I refused to go to bed that night until my bedroom had once again become a no-prosthetics zone, a task which I didn't have the gumption to complete myself. My little brother was granted the onus of removing the legs and returning them to their humble home in the garage.

Once my room was cleared of the legs, I tentatively peered in through the doorway, hoping that these four walls would once again house a safety zone. As soon as I deemed it safe to enter, I leapt into my bed and hid underneath my magic covers.

So there you have it: that's why I have difficulty when in the presence of prostheses. To this day, anything even remotely similar to a prosthetic limb serves as an anti-me force field. Heck, even mannequins make me uneasy.

Since that time, I've moved 350 miles away from my parents' house [and the impending doom of prosthetic legs]. I won't say that the legs were what drove me away, but the newfound distance between the legs and me is most certainly an advantageous byproduct of my living in Nashville.

Crepes, Apes, and Nicole Kidman

Because Nashville, Tennessee is within reasonable driving distance from my hometown, weekend visitors have a tendency to appear at my doorstep with considerable frequency. These visitors often, it seems, have ulterior motives to visiting me: to spy on famous people who live here in Music City.

The key to being a Nashvillian is to act as though you don't care about famous people. You must act suave and say things like, "Who, Dolly Partridge? I don't think I've heard of her. … Ohhh, Parton. You said Dolly Parton. … Hrm. Sounds vaguely familiar."

I've only partially perfected this art. I can remain calm and emotionless while I'm talking to a celebrity, but the moment I walk away, I lose my cool and turn into a preteen. And then I blow up everyone's Twitter and/or Facebook feed about how I just saw, say, the mayor of Shanghai.

Who, for the record, I've never seen in Nashville. Or anywhere, for that matter.

Last summer, a small group of assorted extended family members drove down to Nashville to visit me. As we were discussing various things we could do while they were here, I suggested we get brunch at a hole-in-the-wall cafe-style crepe restaurant about fifteen minutes from my house.

Rumor has it, this restaurant is a favorite of Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban. This is information which, while entirely unverified (I'd been to this particular restaurant multiple times and never seen them), was simultaneously a selling point for my group of relatives. So we planned to trek [ok, drive] down I-65 the next morning to eat brunch at this little five-table crepe shop.

The possibility of seeing Nicole and Keith the next day proved to be more exciting than any of us were willing to admit (my family had already begun to assimilate to the too-cool-for-school Nashville mindset), but it became evident that they were on our minds. There were intermittent rumblings of words that sounded eerily like their names until we finally had no choice but to man up.

So we did what any conscientious upper-middle-class citizen would do in this situation: we devised a secret hand signal to use in the event that we should see a celebrity, particularly Nicole Kidman or Keith Urban.

Each of us contributed a piece of the signal:

• my uncle felt as though clearing your throat would alert the others that something important was happening.
• my aunt wanted to be sure we knew that this was no ordinary throat clearing, so she added a noise to the end of it that was not unlike a rooster's cock-a-doodle-doo.
• not to be outdone, my grandma added a motion following the rooster noise where you put your index finger to the tip of your nose and push up, creating a pig snout.
• I veered from the animal theme, and contributed a motion in which you point upward, and then swirl your finger around in the air a few times. (this motion also conveniently necessitated the finger coming off the nose, and hence fortunately disassembling the pig snout face.)
• at last, my mom finished off the secret hand signal by adding a dramatic point in the direction of the celebrity with your arm fully extended.

Each of these five steps was crucial: without even one of them, the others would certainly have nary a clue that a celebrity was in our midst.

By the time we arrived at the crepe restaurant, we had become very adept at performing this secret hand signal with a nonchalant debonair flair that would put Jackie Kennedy to shame.

We ordered our crepes.

No Nicole Kidman.

No Keith Urban.

We sat down and started to eat.

No Nicole Kidman.

No Keith Urban.

And then it happened.

The door opened, and I, being the only one at the table who was facing the door, locked eyes with the woman who was entering the restaurant.

Nicole Kidman.

A million thoughts began racing through my mind.

I had to alert the others that she had entered the room.

Meanwhile, all the practicing, all the planning, all the secret-hand-signal-making went out the window.

I panicked.

The only thing I could remember was that I was supposed to make two noises in order to alert the others that Nicole Kidman and I were making eye contact.

But in my state of panic, the noises sounded nothing like the throat clearing and roostering that they were meant to. No, instead, I sounded more like a blend of an asthmatic baboon and a donkey in heat.

The instant these sounds escaped my throat, my family froze and looked at me as though I was certainly about to keel over dead.

I never did get to attempt the rest of the hand signal because they realize who had induced my sudden state of panic.

Not that I could've finished it anyway.

And then Nicole Kidman and her daughter hurriedly wolfed down crepes at the table next to us. They seemed to be in a bit of a hurry to eat and leave, presumably as a result of the disturbing baboon-donkey-human who was at the next table over. So that's what they did: they promptly exited the restaurant as unexpectedly as they'd entered.

And that's the day I made ape noises at Nicole Kidman.

Two years ago, I moved from my hometown in rural east-central Indiana [read: nothing exciting occurs aside from the occasional high school basketball game, or things like the grocery store running out of milk and bread because there's a snowstorm coming.] to the buckle of the Bible Belt: Music City itself, Nashville, Tennessee.

Since moving to Nashville, I often seem to find myself in the most curious of situations. You know, the kind of things that only happen in movies.

…or on The Office, immediately followed by one of those classic Jim faces.

The absurdity of events in my everyday life, coupled with the fact that people frequently suggest that I write a book, and enhanced by my mega friend-crush on Allie Brosh, has brought me--nay, us--here today. To this blog. To this mutual point in cyberspace.

And so here we sit. Preparing our hearts and minds for a series of fireside chats, if you will. Fireside chats that have nothing to do with anything of large-scale consequence, but rather, are about the delightfully uncomfortable and strange happenstance of human condition.