If you ever see me when I get out of bed, brush my teeth, and make coffee, you might mistake me for a genius.

The way I put both feet on the floor, squeeze the toothpaste tube all by myself, and manage to get the coffee into the cup are all hallmarks of someone very, very intelligent.

But take me out of my own home and my natural gifts decline.

Particularly when I travel.

Where my stupiderness expands like an exploding popcorn kernel.

And it’s not just that I don’t always know where I’m going, or what people are saying, or even what it means when someone nods their head (in Bulgaria, it means “no”).

It’s also the fact that when I travel, the biggest threat to me is me — me staring down at my phone as I walk to check which way is north; me looking up at a cathedral as I cross an intersection; me failing to notice the tiny step outside the restaurant’s front door that was put there for the sole purpose of watching foreigners fall. 

As a result, over the years I’ve snagged my forehead on electrical wires, tumbled into holes in the sidewalk, and crushed my testicles on an iron sculpture. In fact, in one spectacular fifteen-second sequence in Amsterdam, I managed to clang the top of my head on a street sign, crack my shin on a fire hydrant, and fall off a sidewalk. Which to any passing Dutchman must have looked like the Three Stooges had suddenly been reincarnated into one living man.

And while I’d like to be able to say that these things only happen when I travel abroad, the fact is I’ve driven into oncoming traffic in Nebraska; toppled a table filled with cocktails in Chicago; set a woman’s sweater on fire in L.A.; and sheared off the side mirror of my car in Denver.

That’s to say nothing of the awkwardness and social faux paus that come with encountering new people, customs, and environments. And while it’s one thing to not know you should take off your shoes in a Tokyo home or cover up your legs in a Malaysian mosque or remove all your clothes in a Finnish sauna, it’s another to be drinking with a stumbling librarian in Pittsburgh and decide to say, “You look like you’re even more wasted than me,” only to have her then turn around and say, “I have cerebral palsy.”

And all of these physical and social pitfalls are compounded by the fact that when I’m on a trip I seem to lose all ability to assess risk.

Drink tarantula venom? — Sounds smart.

Smoke the strongest weed in Oregon? — I’m there.

Ride a zipline held up by duct tape? —  Let’s do it.

Wrap a boa constrictor around my neck? — Why not?

And often it’s the places themselves that demonstrate, at least to the few friends I have left, that on the road I make even dumber choices than I do at home. Because while others brag about their time in Paris or Rome, I tell them I went to Three Mile Island.

“You mean where the nuclear reactor melted down?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that even safe?”

“There was no one there to ask.”

Because the fact is I’ll journey miles to see the bizarre (a monument to circus workers killed by lightning), the obscure (World’s Largest Concrete Garden Gnome), the magnificent (Machu Picchu), the tragic (the killing fields of Cambodia), the inappropriate (Lincoln’s outhouse), the gaudy (Saddam Hussein’s palace), the famous (Dorothy’s ruby slippers), the religious (the Church of Scientology headquarters), the musical (Dylan’s boyhood home), the gross (a Mexican cantina where you can relieve yourself while standing at the bar), the historic (from where Trotsky was murdered to where Napoleon was defeated), the ghoulish (from Einstein’s brain to Chopin’s heart), and the deceased (from Ho Chi Minh to Mr. Rogers).

That is when I can actually find all of those places. And not travel the wrong way on a one-way road. And not fall down a flight of stairs. And not become so bored and juvenile on a long drive that I cause my travel companion to turn the car around and drive home (that has happened). Or change to an earlier flight (that has also happened).

All of which raises a very important question:

Why is travel never portrayed this way?

Why in all the travel magazines and travel shows — and particularly on Instagram — is travel mostly about sophistication and status? Beautiful people photographed against the usual backdrops of the Eiffel Tower and the Colosseum, Times Square and Tokyo. All experts after just one class on origami or cajun cooking or tango dancing — in destinations arrived at seemingly without inconvenience or error, as though their mode of transport was not a missed flight on United, but a carriage pulled by unicorns.

But surely that’s not how their travel really went.

Surely they had their own moments of stupidosity — moments where they got lost on the way to a castle or dropped their phone in the Seine or lost their passport in a laundromat or were gored by a bull or punched by a friend or hit by a train or mistook someone with cerebral palsy for a drunk (easy to do).

Because I’ve met the kind of people who post those travel shots. And they’re not that smart even when they’re at home.

I was reminded of this wide gap between how other people’s travel is portrayed and the clown show that is my own during a recent trip to Singapore.

While there, I visited a nineteenth-century Chinese tea house and saw a quartet of twenty-something tourists taking a photo of themselves seated on the floor around their table — all savvy and smiling, heads pressed together like beads on a necklace, each gripped by the inexplicable need to flash the peace symbol — a photo they no doubt posted later on Instagram to demonstrate both their mastery of the tea ceremony and fervent struggle for world peace.

While across the room sat me.

Cross-legged and alone.

Befuddled by a teapot.

For I had just listened to the kind Chinese server methodically explain the centuries-old process by which I was to prepare my tea, an elaborate ritual involving five different receptacles.

But I don’t listen well even at home, much less after a dozen sleepless hours on a plane.

And so all I could remember of it was:  

“You pour something into something.”

“Now you try,” she said.

So I began to pour the hot water.

And she immediately put her hand out to stop me.  

“No, no. First pour the water into this pot.”

I stared at her like a lost fawn in search of its mother.

“Okay,” she said, ever-patient and smiling, “maybe I explain again.”

And so she did — restating the entire set of instructions — for a second time.

Which as I heard them were:

“You take the thing and pour it into the thing and then the thing and the thing.”

And when she was done, she motioned for me to try again.

So I picked up one of the teapots.

The wrong teapot.

And that’s when the smiling Chinese woman stopped smiling.

“This not rocket science,” she snapped.

I looked up at her.

“No need M.I.T.” she added, a reference to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Her twisted face looked like that of every exasperated teacher I had ever had, from pre-school to law school, each of whom found my poor listening skills unfathomable.

And so, much like those teachers, she shook her head and abandoned me.

Never to return to my sad, little table.

Where I sat on the floor randomly pouring one receptacle into another, like a four-year-old making mud pies with the hose.

Demonstrating a level of stupidity you rarely see in travel stories.

At least until now.