Damn you, Isaac Newton. This is all your fault. And damn you, Birkenstock. This is all your fault too. What has so far been an otherwise perfectly splendid Saturday morning was marred while I was doing laundry. As if the laundry itself wasn't enough to take away from my Saturday, I had to go and make a human train wreck of myself while climbing the stairs back up to my apartment.

It's easy to be lulled into a sense of complacency once you're used to living somewhere. You forget that climbing stairs is potentially very dangerous, especially when wearing your comfy Birkenstock sandals and when carrying a couple of empty laundry baskets. Couple all that with thoughts along the lines of trying to come up with a way to leak to the press that Ann Coulter is really a raunchy leather dominatrix who has a penchant for making clergymen her bitches, and you're in for it.

Here's a breakdown, as best as I can remember it, of what happened:

1. After putting all my laundry in the washers, I head back upstairs, clutching the empty laundry baskets in my arms.
2. Midway through the climb up the second flight of said stairs, I don't lift my right foot quite high enough to make the next step.
3. My Birkenstock shoe meets the concrete step head-on.
4. Newton's third law ("every action has an equal and opposite reaction") comes into play: my moving foot hit something inanimate, and immediately moved the opposite direction.
5. Of course, the moving force (train) that is the rest of my body continued to move with its forward momentum, while my foot moved backward.
6. As I fall onto the stairs and then down them (wreck), I fling the laundry baskets away from me as I scramble to catch myself.
7. The laundry baskets hit the stairs above me and follow me down.
8. My left knee and arm make contact with the concrete steps, and then with the stupid laundry baskets.

Long story short, I picked my laundry-ass-whooped self up and headed inside to inspect the damage. And the score came out thusly:

Laundry Baskets: 1 Phil: 0

Whereas my laundry baskets barely got a scratch on them, I walked away with a bruised and scraped knee, and also a cut, scraped, and bruised arm. This I find sad. Here I could have broken some bone, or perhaps torn my skin and required stitches. Thankfully, this isn't the case. But my point is it could have cost several hundreds of dollars to repair myself. The laundry baskets, on the other hand, could be mended (if broken) for practically a penny, or else replaced completely for a hundred pennies. I see a serious discrepancy in the product value here. You'd think the cheapest of the two would take the heavier beating.

But no, we can't have that, apparently. For me to measure up, I'd have to wear a suit of body armor made by Sterilite. That would be a terrible fashion statement, though, so let's not go there.