Oooh, Awkward

It has to just be that I’m getting older, but I found myself, this morning at work, a little overwhelmed by my very fun and busy and social and awesome weekend. There were parties and dinners and visits people I haven’t seen for a while and people I see all the time and people I have started to see a little more of and some people I had never met before. There were dogs and babies and long phone conversations and crisp sunny walks and a lot of stupid jokes and some frantic cell phone calls when I got lost at various points, as well as the purchase of the black hoodie that I sense will get me through the long months ahead. There was the consumption of delicious goat cheese on several occasions. I stayed out late (well, for me) Friday, Saturday and Sunday plus rearranged the living room furniture with a quorum of housemates for “better party flow,” so I guess it’s not too surprising that I was not really feeling it this morning. I am at heart a creature of habit and I was in a weird mood for most of the day. I just got back from bellydance and even there we were doing a lot of left leading, which means nothing to most of the people who read this journal but for the sake of metaphor I will just mention that in tribal we do almost all the moves with our left hip and our left foot, unless of course you get really crazy and decide to left lead, which means…and follow me closely here…you do everything with the left hip and the left foot. The simplest and most basic moves feel utterly strange and foreign, and it kind of made sense to me that even dancing would feel backwards today.

I’m thinking about my social life a lot lately, I guess. It feels funny to even think in terms of a “social life.” That just sounds like something eighth graders have, or something, like when your mom chastises you about spending too much time on the phone instead of on your algebra homework. It’s like the concept of popularity, which for me was dead and gone and over, thank goodness, when I graduated from high school. It just doesn’t make sense anymore, it doesn’t mean anything.

That doesn’t mean, though, that I’m not still aware of little ebbs and flows amongst my friends and acquaintainces. I have this annoying thing I do in conversation sometimes, when we’ll all be talking and joking around and someone will tease someone else about their hair or their predilection for Ace of Base and I’ll jump in with a fake concerned face and raise my eyebrows and go “Oooh, awkward,” and then everyone laughs and we go back to discussing karaoke or candy or whatever. But even as I do that all the time I find myself being, seriously, excruiciatingly aware of awkward social situations, which are driving me mad.

You know the kind of stuff I mean. The friend you have to run interference for when he’s drunk so that other people won’t get too offended and so that they won’t stop hanging out with you because you’re friends with him. The other friend who will casually throw out the fun fact that his best friend committed suicide when they were fifteen and he’s never really gotten over it, in the middle of a conversation about eighties’ hair or something. The one girl who talks about sex all the time, always when there are guys around, and not even in a cool way where it’s funny and silly but in a way that’s supposed to let everyone (i.e., the guys) know that, like, she just doesn’t care what people think, man, and there she is, talking about blow jobs or whatever as if she’s this iconoclast when really people just want to get back to their conversation about where they were during the early nineties (“It was extremely difficult to do grunge in Miami, dude, trust me”) or how crazy the hurricane coverage is making them or whatever, but you kind of have to pay attention to her because sex is supposed to be the most important thing and then there’s that pause where she’s all leaning back waiting for someone to blush or be all “I can’t believe you are talking about this!!!” and it’s just all very weird. Yeah. “Ooh, awkward.”

I can’t stop thinking about all this lately, the different types of social tone-deafness, the various ways you can mess up a perfectly nice conversation, the little cues that are so obvious but so easily missed. I live with this low-level constant fear, sometimes, that I will never get that sort of thing right. I cringe sometimes when I listen to myself talking in a large group, like, seriously, Chiara, stop talking about strippers for one goddamn minute of the day, because it’s soo 2004 but I can’t always stop. I am also queen of the long answer to the short question, and that absolutely kills me when I do it and I cannot stop. This morning when I sort of scowled my way into work, after a mere six hours of sleep and was hunched over my oatmeal muttering to myself, my coworked asked, innocently enough, about my weekend, and I got into it. I heard myself babbling and told myself to shut up and say something like “Lots of fun!” or something, but no. I had to give her all the richly rendered details of each encounter I’d had, from the woman I’d heard about on the internet but never met until Friday to the girl at the pluot stand at the market on Sunday. I was out of breath when I finished my recitation and my coworker, bless her tolerant heart, just smiled and raised her eyebrows and went “Sounds like an emotional rollercoaster” and I managed to limit myself to “Oh, it was” and clamp my mouth shut before I went back torturing myself with the liberal blogs’ hurricane coverage. I’ve been kind of kicking myself about it all day. I don’t know when I’ll master the underappreciated art of answering “Fine, thanks, and yours?” to a question like that.

I don’t know why I’m so sensitive about this lately. I’m getting lots of invitations to do fun things so either the world is conspiring to take pity on me or some people, at least, find me okay to hang around with for limited time periods. I’m having quite a lot of fun wherever I go and am having the rare privilege to have all sorts of interesting conversations with people I know well and people I’ve just met. Lately I’ve been having at least one of those a day and I’ll go to bed and think about what I learned from the person with whom I had the conversation and sometimes the world will feel so big and expansive and I’ll think about everything there is in it, all the new perspectives on the old ideas and all the things of wonder and beauty contained therein. Other times the world will feel cozy and comfortable, the size and shape of the room my friend I were talking in, and I’ll think about all the ways you can know or not know someone and how, as an old friend of mine said, if you want to be fascinated for the rest of your life, there is no better subject to study in than other people.

So given all that, my focus on social weirdness seems strange and disjointed. Leading left, doing something familiar but from a different angle. I guess I just like the good parts about having a social circle, being part of a community, even, so much lately, that the awkward stuff feels even odder and out of place.


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