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.

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.

I apologize for my unannounced and entirely too-long vacation from writing about awkward things I used to, currently am, or intend to say to girls. Here are some examples of what definitely are not reasons why I haven’t been posting on my blog:

1. I have become polished and suave.
2. I ran out of old stories that could be written about. That’s it. The website has all my awkward stories.
3. I started another blog.
4. The Hot Copy Editor story is done. Nothing else happened.

In order: yeah right, as if, I don’t cheat, and we’re just getting started. So don’t worry. I feel rejuvenated and refreshed, blog-wise. Life-wise is a different story, but, then again, if everyone went around happy and unstressed all the time, who would be left to create and use the Internet?

One or two contextual points that I want to just get out of the way, here:

• Those of you who ever previously noticed the sidebar to the right may pick up on the sudden glaring omission in the Cast of Characters. I don’t really want to talk about it. I’m still processing and moving on and mourning a little.
• The Hot Copy Editor story was getting a little intense for me to write, I think. I’m glad I took a step back. But I’m totally ready for another shot.
• Thank you for clamoring for my return. I know I have appeared to have been turning a cold, callous ear on the cries of my adoring fans, but I thought about each and every one of you the entire time I was spending long hours working on real, actual work (or, let’s be honest, having fun and wasting time) instead of writing awkward memoirs.

So, buckle up. I’ve got a whole backlog of awkwardness, all kinds of (entirely non-personal and in no way to connected to any particular relationship, necessarily) dating thoughts, and it’s a long way from a Lake Michigan beach in 2002 to an apartment not far from a highway in Northeast Ohio in 2005. I’ve got some writing to do.

It’s exciting that so many new people seem to be reading Awkward Things these days. If you are reading this, then you aren’t like one of those people who only come to learn why geeks make good lovers and, like guys who have something early to do tomorrow and, like, need to get going so they can get some sleep, scuttle away without so much as the approximation of a cuddle. Thanks for staying around to hold me.

See, right there. That was a little awkward, right? That’s pretty much how I roll on a regular basis. But if I wasn’t so awkward, I wouldn’t be able to have this awesome website, now, would I? Nope.

So, to help you learn to be awkward like me, I’ve created these four helpful tips:

1. Lose any ability to tell how awkward you are being. Feel awkward about asking for the electronica section in a music store, but not awkward at all about telling a girl that you need more of her in your lifestyle. If you have literally no ability to predict in advance how awkward a situation is, you’ll be way more likely to have a ton of awkward conversations.

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Popular mythology would have you believe that the “Friend Zone” is an inescapable Sarlacc Pit of tantalizing doom. The Friend Zone is scary. A guy can innocently befriend a girl¹, could realize after the expiration of the new-acquaintence validation period that he wants to date her, but could then find that, due to his delay, he is locked into a thousand years of being digested by friendship, shopping, and talking about her boyfriend.

This trap used to be particularly easy for me to fall into because I was scared to ask girls out, yet I love being their best friends. I do like talking about emotions, after all. After much trial and error, I figured out how to prevent it, how to identify it, and how to deal with it once it’s taken root. So, as promised, in my attempt to provide something of value to my heterosexual male readers, all six of you, I would like to present my tried-and-true steps for getting out of the Friend Zone.

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If you are or ever become a single girl who wants a relationship, and you ever happen to see, meet, or become acquainted with someone you are interested in dating, I would like to humbly suggest that you consider, maybe, perhaps only when the conditions are space shuttle launch appropriate, actually proactively asking that person out on a date.

I know I am being horribly rude. I’m sorry. I intentionally have tried to keep these advice-type posts as gender- or sexual-preference-neutral as I can. I do this not for politics, but for a more practical reason: I want as many people to laugh at what I’m writing as possible. (It sure isn’t so that my advice convinces people. Taking dating advice from me is like taking milking advice from a cow. It happens, but I’m not entirely familiar what’s going on down there, honestly.) So I apologize for singling out heterosexual girls today. Don’t worry, I’ll have something at least as air-quotes “helpful” to say to guys about hitting on girls next week. I don’t have much productive to say about girls hitting on girls, but guys hitting on guys reminded me of a story I need to tell on this website. I don’t know, do you think it fits the theme? Close enough. At any rate, it isn’t as though I personally need to be hit on. I don’t. I’m hoping that’s part of why I can pull this off.

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This one kind of amazed me when I figured it out, like 6 months ago, when I was still single.

So, assume you’re single. Hold on. First, let me say that the following is a plausible yet hypothetical situation inspired by, like, my entire freaking website, including the posts that are nothing but a twinkle in my notepad file. This hasn’t happened to me. Yet. Keep this in mind.

Assume there is a guy or girl, depending, that you desperately want to talk to. Say, you’re, I dunno, in the laxative aisle at the drug store and this incredibly smoking-hot person is just achingly close to you in the worst way. Your two choices are obvious: do nothing, or say something. We will exclude any alleged choices that could involve eventual incarceration.

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One of the Universal Truths that lie just beyond the fabric of modern society is the axiom that geeks, along with nerds and other peoples who overinvest in intelligence but boast underdeveloped social skills, make the best lovers. Once people realize this, the sexual revolution that will sweep through western culture will make the seventies look like the fifties, and I’m not talking about wider pants. The reasons why geeks are unparalleled as lovers are simple and many:

Geeks don’t sleep around. Geeks, through their higher IQ and therefore greater understanding of the tragedy of human condition, know that the dice only seem to have more sides on the other side of the table. Hence, they instinctively stay loyal to their lovers through thick and thin. Their social skills are also not well developed enough to support an affair, and frankly, geeks generally aren’t quite sure how they ended up with the lover they have attracted. When you date a geek, you know the geek will be yours until you are done.

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You’ve been to bars, but you really aren’t interested in choosing someone to date based 100% purely on looks. Well, fine, 98%. You don’t go to church; the church you go to has only old people, married people, or kids at it; or you’ve already dated someone at your church and, since all the people in your age group at your church are friends, you’re pretty much off limits to all of them now. You aren’t in school anymore, and you’re still annoyed that no one told you how much amazingly easier it is to meet people in school than in the real world.

Work is work.

You might have even tried online dating, but subsequently found that the human brain is incredibly sophisticated in its ability to integrate the innumerable subtle behavioral variables by which each person is uniquely distinguished from each other person, giving live face-to-face contact a tremendous advantage over online encounters when it comes to evaluating and selecting potential dates. Or, you know, maybe you tried and all you met were losers.

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I’ve had a few DTR-related conversations with guys recently that have made me wonder how many people are afraid, procrastinatory, unaware, or simply confused about how to handle this crucial step in a relationship.

I’m hoping I can help, and, seriously, you should trust me because I run a website called “Awkward Things I Say To Girls.” Clearly I’m an expert on the topic of what to say to girls. I never make a mistake! A “DTR,” or “Define the Relationship” conversation, is generally thought to mean (by me, because, seriously, I don’t get up early enough in the morning to do honest to goodness research for this site, like, for example, visiting another site to see if this is just a thing my friends and I made up) (my friends have compelling ideas, so sometimes I forget which ones are original and not pop culture) (this ridiculous chasm I have now opened in a once strong, true, and unified sentence structure, and the fact that I thought it was a good idea is, by the way, why I will never get paid for anything I write) as the conversation a couple has when they decide to stop hanging out and start calling their relationship a relationship.

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