I am walking down the street and the thought suddenly occurs to me that if I should happen to trip and fall or merely hurtle forward and almost fall with wildly pinwheeling arms and a childish gasp I must not under any circumstances, after recovering my equilibrium, turn and glare or make any other expression of fake astonishment and/or outrage at the spot on the sidewalk where the misstep took place in a completely transparent attempt to somehow in some obscure way deflect humiliation away from me and direct the attention of any possible observers toward some imaginary defect in the pavement or invisible obstacle in my path, as such a conspicuous ego-protective advertisement of self-consciousness is far, far worse than tripping over my own feet in public and when people embarrass themselves in front of others in this or any of a thousand other ways the ones we respect are the ones who can immediately laugh at themselves and take full responsibility for being a klutz without thinking about it and sort of comfortably inhabit their own embarrassment for as long as it naturally occurs and don't automatically attempt this reflex sort of diversionary tactic and conversely how much more embarrassed we are for people who compound the initial public clumsiness by actually going back and staring at an empty area of sidewalk as if it holds some magical exonerative data which they know perfectly well it doesn't and they aren't even sure anyone is looking at them but they do this just in case someone is, and how I will never remotely resemble the former kind of person and always struggle to avoid seeming like the latter. As I am walking down the street it occurs to me that here is something like a fundamental element of the so-called human condition and I get so distracted by this thought that I walk into a parking meter.