Chirky

It's kind of bizarre that I own a curling iron, particularly when one considers that I have naturally curly hair. I'm not sure why I ever bought it in the first place, but this morning it came in handy in the most unexpected way.

I've never been much of a morning routine type of person. I don't wake up at a certain hour, eat breakfast, shower, get dressed and do whatever morning-routine-type-people do. In fact, my lack of routine has never really been an issue before.

(Unless you count yesterday: I had been at work for two and a half hours when I suddenly realized that I had forgotten to put on deodorant – and how I forgot this, I'll never know, because it's kind of a crucial part of my morning, like getting dressed or brushing my teeth – so I monitored myself all day long, so vexed was I that my hygiene might be askew. I made it all the way through the day without experiencing offensive odors until I got on the elevator to go home that afternoon. And on the elevator were only two people: a man and me, and the stench of body odor hit me so fiercely that I started gagging and toppled over. I assumed that the man couldn't smell it because he didn't seem visibly concerned about the olfactory offense at all. When he got off the elevator, the pong followed him. I stared at his armpits as he walked away, expecting little field mice to pop out and glower at me with their beady little Bubonic Plague eyes, because it smelled like HE had skipped deodorant for a lifetime, not just a day.)

Rather, my mornings go something like this:

7:00 a.m. -- Alarm clock trumpets a tune from the local Classical station. On off-days, it blares the March of the Day, and believe me, it's enough to make one levitate – eyes open and hand raised in a salute – from a dead sleep.

7:14 a.m. -- Still lying in bed, ignoring the time and drifting in and out of sleep.

7:26 a.m. -- Roll over, look at the clock in horror; realize I need to get out of bed so that I can get to work on time.

7:34 a.m. -- Still lying in bed, pretending to think about what I want to wear to work that day.

7:41 a.m. -- Throw back the covers. Run to the shower.

7:56 a.m. -- Pull clothes out of the closet, hurriedly get dressed, fix hair and smother face in makeup. Luckily, I'm fairly low maintenance and only wear blush, mascara and lip gloss. Except today, because I skipped the mascara so that I would have time to brush my teeth. I do have priorities, after all.

8:13 a.m. -- Walk out the door, pray for no traffic.

Today, however, something happened between 7:56 a.m. and 8:13 a.m. that concerned me, and my eyes darted around like Bill Clinton caught in a lie. I needed an escape route, a worthy substitute, because something was wrong with my shirt: it desperately needed to be ironed. I was running late and hauling the ironing board out of the laundry room closet, setting it up, plugging the iron in, waiting for it to heat up, ironing my entire shirt and putting it all away again required more time and energy than I was willing to allow myself.

One thing you may not know about me is that I have an uncanny ability to improvise, and I think it's genetics since my dad was a Navy S.E.A.L. It's ingrained into everything I do – from putting on makeup to cooking dinner – and at the drop of a hat I could probably make an explosive device out of a toothpick and a bottle of Heinz 57.

So I dusted off my curling iron, plugged it in, and thirty seconds later I was ironing the top four inches of the vertical opening of my blouse, which was the only part that I cared about. Since the rest of my shirt would be hidden beneath my sleeveless sweater, I reasoned that no one would care whether that part was rumpled. De-wrinkling a shirt with a curling iron is relatively easy, as long as you take care not to give your shirt a temporary spiral perm. I knew that one day owning a curling iron would be advantageous. Now I know why.

I think there's something to be said for improvisation, especially when everything you need is at your fingertips and you're too lazy to assemble it all. I mean: why make a pipe bomb with gun powder when you can use steak sauce from your refrigerator instead, right?