Awkward Things I Say To Girls

Gyaaaahah!!!! Jeez, man, write something!!!
—Everyone

Okay. You didn’t want to do any work today anyway. But rather than fire directly into Part 4 of an ongoing story or take a shot at transcribing any pent up awkward things of which I have several, let’s do a long-overdue Q&A mailbag. The rules: questions, comments, insults, and search keywords that someone used to find the website will be in bold. The silken lyrics of forgotten love songs, which may or may not be awkward, will be in regular type.

It is not is surprise to see that quirky yet relatable blogs like Awkward Things I Say To Girls ran away with Funniest Blog and Most Addicting Blog…
—Jon Baliles

The nice thing about Q&A blog posts is that I get to pick any Q I want, including ones that Alex Trebek would never allow. Especially ones that are not in the form of a question and talk about how awesome I am. Thanks to all of you who nominated and voted for me in the first Richmond Blog Awards. Your check and autographed picture should arrive in the mail shortly. In the meantime, I have begun to wear a name tag that says “Hello, I am the funniest, most addicting man in Richmond” whenever I go to a bar to hit on girls. It isn’t awkward at all.

Congratulations to all of the rest of the winners also. I’m proud to be a part of the diverse and maturing Richmond Blog scene.

If I’m in the friend zone, why does she flirt with me?
—Search term

She flirts with you because you’re a fun person to flirt with and she likes the attention, and maybe because you’re misreading the situation and she wants to go out with you. Which brings me to something I’ve been meaning to post for a while. Those especially committed procrastinators who have any sort of maternal or paternal mentoring-type feelings stirring deep inside themselves, assuming they’re sure it isn’t morning sickness or indigestion, respectively, may want to click on over to the comments section of what has become one of the most popular posts on the site, pageview wise: Getting Out of the Friend Zone: The Easy Way.

Those of us who have commented there have become a close bunch, like an organized crime family who has also travelled cross-country in a van. But there are unanswered questions, such as “how” and “what if.” There are feelings oozing out of the confining rectilinearity of the “submit comment” box. For some reason, feelings seem to hit my readership right in its wheelhouse.

When’s the book version coming up?
—jesstagirl

When I get paid to write, you will get your book. In the meantime you get INAD chapters whenever I can anesthetize myself enough to perform the necessary autovivisection. For example, I wrote one of the more recent chapters after seeing The Notebook, which I don’t want to talk about for emotional reasons except to say, with a controlled expression and distant stare, that it reminded me of something. You also get some facts. Here they are:

• INAD is about 15,000 words so far in total, which I hear works out to be 60 pages.
• The entire story has five parts, of which I have completed three.
• I think there are 16 more chapters between the remaining two parts.
• Writing it out helps.

“Could you have another chance after you rejected a guy?”
—Search term

Almost all of my high-pressure adolescent girl-related moments were accompanied by the vivid sensation of falling. “Will you go to the Eighth Grade Dance with me?” I asked the tall, quiet, and smart girl that I happened to have a huge crush on when I had just turned 14. I couldn’t support my body, though, so even though an early growth spurt had kept me lanky, I found myself looking almost up into her eyes from a half slouch against the wall of the cafeteria next to the little school-supply store where you could buy pencils and notebook paper during lunch.

“No.” By the tenth grade, girls had started to append an apology to the ends of their rejections, but I guess eighth graders hadn’t learned that yet. I didn’t even feel that bad about it though. I just picked myself up off the wall and went on with my lunch, running through my backup options.

But I didn’t need them after all. “Hey Justin,” said the girl in sixth period science class. “Some people are going together to the dance in like a group. I mean, you can come with me to that if you want. Do you want to?”

I don’t mind if I do, I thought, and wondered idly how awesome I was to have convinced her to un-reject me. I did all the date things, like giving her a corsage that matched her dress and dancing with her a few times. But after the stiffest dances I’ve ever danced with any girl it was undesirably clear, like a Filipino Monkey transmission into my brain, that she had no interest in me after all and that my inclusion in the group, while not unappreciated by others (who danced with me multiple times), had more to do with the immutable set theory of dance-date monogamy than with the girl actually, like, liking me.

That wasn’t the first time that kind of thing happened to me, and I’m sure lots of guys have similar experiences. This makes us wary. But if I ask someone out, I did it because I was interested in them, and interest has a way of not fading as quickly as you’d want it to.

So, uh, the answer is “Yes.” Sorry. I guess that was a parable.

Are you awkward?
—Search term

Yes. Yes I am.

Part 3 of 5, Chapter 17

FYI, this is an It’s Not a Date story post. New to the story? Start at the beginning.

I broke her gaze and looked down at the box of relationship-droppings, outside her dorm room. “You broke up with him.” Junior Midshipman Obvious, sir, reporting for duty aboard the USS No Kidding. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll be fine as soon as I get everything that was his out of my life,” HCE said. “Here, you can help. Find his books in the shelf and put them in the box.”

“Which ones are his?”

“Which ones are stupid? At least give me some good news. How is your girlfriend?”

Read the rest of this entry »

Part 3, Chapter 16

FYI, this is an It’s Not a Date story post. New to the story? Start at the beginning.

I only spent a few nights up in Art School Girl’s cozy, strange bedroom at the top of the ancient house just off campus that she shared with three other people. It was Dumbledore’s office if he had been an art student, full of dark colors and smelling like home.

“What is this?” I said the first time I took a tour of her bedroom, pointing at spilled sand on the wood floor beneath a window.

“Don’t step in it! That’s a bird.” A bird? Oh. I noticed the tracks. “After I spilled sand one day, the bird got in and walked on it. I figured I’d just leave the tracks here.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Part 3, Chapter 15

FYI, this is an It’s Not a Date story post. New to the story? Start at the beginning.

“Finally,” I thought, as I leaned in to kiss her.

I specifically remember this particular kiss as being the first time I realized how much I like to draw out those brief intermediary moments when there’s a pause and your faces, eyes still closed, remain micrometers away but yet fully connected by the warmth and breath and anticipation, stretching those quick quarter-second kiss-intermissions that punctuate any normal makeout to ten seconds or more, until both of you are wound up so much that you’re unable to delay gratification any longer without being so full of adrenaline you burst.

It’s tough to describe without physically coming over and puckering up. Plus, the previous paragraph is guaranteed to be awkward or your money back. Who cares? I thought the kiss was spectacular, and I’m pretty sure she liked it, because, when I finally wrapped it up and stepped back, she whispered, eyes still closed, “Please, could you do that again?”

Read the rest of this entry »

“She was super hot though.”

“What?!” I say to my friend sitting two stools down from me at the bar. “You can’t be hot without being smart. They’re like the same word.”

The waitress making a drink behind the bar snorts, smiles, and looks up at me. We make the kind of eye contact that only happens when two people connect at last, hungrily, across the endless void that leaves souls cold and alone.

This is important, because after briefly dating the nerdy girl who I had incidentally met several weeks before writing about her, I am single again. It’s okay, I’m fine with it. I’m balanced and stable and centered and ready to start awkwardly hitting on waitresses for your personal enjoyment. So here goes:

Read the rest of this entry »

Part 3, Chapter 14

FYI, this is an It’s Not a Date story post. New to the story? Start at the beginning.

“Justin, I can’t begin to describe how drunk I was…”

“Don’t even worry about it.”

“You think I’m dreadful. I’m so sorry for behaving like that.”

“Quiet. Listen: I have a few thoughts about the other night. I’ll write you a haiku.”

“Okay!”

Read the rest of this entry »

“Why don’t you give me your phone number so I can call you?”

“Okay. I don’t know why I got my phone out too. I guess to look at what my number is?”

“Hang on. I’m in the wrong menu. Wait. Clear. New contact. Okay, go.”

“You mean, now?”

I may have met my awkward match.

—

She was so cute I almost sat down next to her, just after my friend had introduced us. I’m an absolute sucker for huge, clear eyes and shoulder-length brown hair. I am even more of a sucker for girls who share names of spectacularly desirable female fictional characters. Let’s call this one Elizabeth Bennet.

“Sit down right here,” the friend on the opposite side of the booth had to remind me. I guess, sure. If you want to sit at a booth where a friend and a stranger are sitting opposite one another, I suppose politeness requires you to sit next to the friend, even if the stranger is remarkably hot. This is not only less anonymously invasive of personal space, but also has the advantage of allowing you to look at the strangers pretty eyes. “We’re just talking about Elizabeth’s boy problems.”

“I know!” says EB. “I’m such a disaster. Boys!”

Fortunately: “I like talking about emotions.”

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Part 3, Chapter 13

FYI, this is an It’s Not a Date story post. New to the story? Start at the beginning.

On a frozen February Friday in 2003, HCE and her suitemates tried to drink their weight in boxed wine. Think serious motor skill disruption and mental impairment. HCE’s favorite suitemate and best female friend managed to pass herself out, is how bad we’re talking. People were unable to stand. I know because I stumbled into the suite after midnight. I was escorting her other suitemates home from an entirely chaste and sober movie, because I had spent so much time at the suite being platonic that they all wanted me for their platonic own.

After great personal struggle with my own verbosity and emotional exhibitionism, I have chosen to present my reconstruction of our subsequent Instant Messenger conversation to you un-cut, free of stylistic interruption. Just know that I felt at least a few emotions during the following.

Read the rest of this entry »

Part 3, Chapter 12

FYI, this is an It’s Not a Date story post, and the below-described escapade is most definitely not a date. New to the story? Start at the beginning.

The hot ex-copy editor and I are holding hands while walking back from having cider at the sort of coffeeshop they don’t have in the south, the kind that is big enough to be a house and so cozy inside that the windows are fogged constantly in the freezing winter. I put my arm around her and pull her close. She snuggles into my shoulder.

It’s a Thursday night in March of 2003. Despite all appearances, someone else is her boyfriend. Still.

It wasn’t my idea to escalate our relationship into cute semi-harmless physical contact, but getting hooked on heroin isn’t just something you just put on your day planner either. In our case, my relationship-boundary-observing world had been shattered months before when she suddenly pulled my arm around her when we were walking along. Since them, you couldn’t stop me from publicly or privately displaying non-kissing affection if you tried, and she didn’t. I never got on base, but I was certainly doing what baseball players refer to as “making contact.” Look, plenty of people cuddle with their platonic non-single best friends during movies. Right? That’s not weird.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s true. Not only am I guilty of neglect and emotional distance with respect to Awkward Things, I recently completed a collaborative fiction project over at another website. Yesterday we launched another one.

The first was called This Most Recent Unpleasantness. It was co-written by Ross, who runs the whole website and who I have to thank for getting me excited pushing me along occassionally. I can’t think of any better way to get you to go read it than to say that, at one point, I have an awkward conversation with a girl who is turning into a zombie.

I looked down at her legs. Her right shin was in her lap. “Yes, you’ll be fine. Let’s get you to a hospital. And then afterwards, dinner? Is that a thing? Because I’ve always . . .”

She interrupted me again, yelling “I am on fire!” She screamed in pain. “Kill me . . . ”

Obviously this girl just has a problem with listening. That’s okay, though. I mean, communication is something you can deal with in a relationship. “The thing is, I’ve been secretly in love with . . .”

That’s when she spat blood all over me. It was as I was staggering away that she suddenly stood up, broken leg or no, and started shambling towards me, groaning loudly.

The newest project is called Gifted & Talented. This one is also collaborative and first-person, but it’s expected to be a bit longer and is being cowritten by Ross along with Val and Susan, both of whom I am ultra excited to write a piece with. Best of all for me, I get to write in a very different voice than I typically use:

It’s fully morning and I’m fully sober when I walk into the apartment. I don’t even look at my prick roommate before I start busting his balls. Call it a habit.

“Hey, asshole, I ran into your sister at the race last night. I think her butt’s getting bigger now that she’s 17. I like it.”

Now, don’t you worry your pretty heads about ATISTG. I’m practically bursting to tell you what happened last weekend, as soon as a I get the chance to edit the loooooong e-mail I wrote to a friend about it yesterday. But I figure that if I’m going to give you something to do for hours when you don’t want to work, I’m going to need more variety and lots of help from my friends.