By Paige Thompson

It was a normal day a few years back, and my sister Lora, my mom, and I were in Target. While my mom went off and did her thing, Lora and I decided to go look at the movies. I wandered off my myself to another aisle, looking at something else. I walked down the rows of movies, wishing my mom would hurry up, minding my own business.

Suddenly, I heard a loud ‘hayah!’ echo through the building from a few aisles over. A million thoughts ran through my head, including, “Who is this freak, and why are they doing karate in the middle of Target?” But I went about my business anyway ,not really thinking about it too much.

Then it dawned on me that my sister was around the spot where the noise came from. “Please…do not let that be my sister…” I thought, knowing deep down in the pit of my stomach that it probably was. Not two seconds after hearing the noise, my thoughts were interrupted when Lora ran around the corner. The look on her face told the whole story. It was red, and it had a look of sheer terror.

“Oh no…” I thought, and sure enough, she began to tell me the entire story. She was standing where I had left her, looking at movies. She had seen me walk off and decided to come up and scare me. This is when she lifted her leg, lifted her arms, and “karate chopped” me. Alas, it was not me that she had karate chopped. The small, innocent woman that she had just busted out her karate moves on turned around, giving her a look that said, “Who the heck are you and why did you just karate chop me?” At this point, my poor sister, utterly mortified at the fact that she just pretended to karate chop a total stranger, decided to make a run for it. This is when she came upon me, minding my own business in a completely different aisle, and proceeded to tell this story to me while I was dying of laughter. Needless to say, I karate chopped her a few times throughout that day, while she said “Shut up Paige” with a red face and a smile appearing.

Everyone has these embarrassing or awkward moments in life. I know I have them pretty much on a daily basis, and while I wish I could have written about one of my them, like the time a chicken tried to roost in my hair, I felt that it was my obligation to talk about a few belonging to my sister Lora, since her embarrassing moments are better than mine and she seems to be able to embrace them more than me. I look up to her for this reason.
These embarrassing moments become our stories. I cannot even begin to tell you how many times while trying to describe my sister to a person, I have used the Target karate chop story. I know that these moments can be utterly humiliating at the time, but with people to laugh it off with, they become great memories and stories to tell later that people can relate to because everyone has them.

My sister’s embarrassment has turned into well-told and well-loved stories in my family. In fact, just the other day in my history class I was re-telling some of these stories, and even from across the room my cousin Jackson knew exactly what I was talking about and began laughing with me.
Don’t sweat those awkward moments. Instead, embrace them with a laugh and a sense of humor, keeping them in your memory for later like my sister, who can simply laugh at herself and embrace her embarrassment as another funny story.