Awkward Things I Say To Girls

Oh. Oh dear. We haven’t talked about answering machines yet.

I just spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out if answering machines are to me what spinach is to an awkward Popeye, or like what kryptonite is to a socially super-adept Superman. There were pros and cons. I plotted a graph of accuracy versus humor. I was about to make a PowerPoint presentation. But, look, how about you decide for yourself which interpretation resonates with you the most, while I tell you about an awkward phone conversation I just had with a friend, and we’ll just agree to roll postmodern style.

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“Whoever designed this colorblindness test is dumb. How am I supposed to see a number when I can’t even tell these stupid dots apart?”

That’s what I was thinking to myself, not even remotely in the ballpark of understanding what was really going on. (I have since figured out the obvious.) This was tenth grade science class, and we were studying genetic disorders. People were doing class presentations.

Tenth grade means fifteen. Fifteen is the age when a person’s ambient level of life-long awkwardness is multiplied by approximately eleventeen thousand, which made me, at fifteen, an adolescent disaster explosion.

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I paused outside my car and thought through everything. I was about to go pick up a girl for our date, my first first date in over a year. There has to be something I am forgetting. Let me think through it from the beginning.

Wait, I can’t type that with a straight face. It’s a total lie in all possible ways. I am fundamentally incapable of thinking things through from the beginning, which is part of why I think I’m fundamentally incapable of expressing complete thoughts to girls. Ask any of them. This is what I said to a girl last night on the phone: “I’m not so . . . verbally . . . well, you know.” But that’s quite another story entirely.

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“Okay folks, lets get started warming up.”

That’s me, directing my high school choir class when I was a senior in high school. I’m leaning over the black upright piano trying to conduct a scale with my right hand while playing along with my left, because if I don’t, who knows how sharp we’ll go.

“Again, but please try to wake up and at least attempt to blend your vowels.”

On that particular morning, the new girl was being chatty with the other altos. At that point I really didn’t know much about her other than the fact that she had just moved during the summer, she had these arrestingly dark eyes that I was extremely interested in, and that she would not shut up.

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It was New Year’s Eve, and I was reflecting. It wasn’t a bad place to do it, really – in a bar full of people I had just met, along with my best friend from work. They were nice, although I got the feeling that one girl in particular wanted to talk to me. As in, she wanted to hit on me. Well, maybe. I thought so.

But see, here’s the thing. I wasn’t impolite to her, but I said oh, that’s interesting these things that you are saying, but then engaged in conversation with some other people. Honestly, I really didn’t want to even think about chatting up girls at a bar on New Year’s Eve.

Hopefully you haven’t spilled your coffee mug on any important work papers that you ought to be reading right now, but it was true. I have limits. Even though I was drinking and she was quite tipsy, I kind of just wanted to enjoy talking to new friends while letting my mind wander other places. Like, for example, how have my relationships with other people changed in 2006? Some have weakened while others have grown stronger. But overall, it’s been a year where . . .

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Certain kinds of salmon manage to travel 900 miles upstream from the Pacific ocean into central Idaho to have babies. And, seriously, judging by this gross picture of a dissected salmon, salmon brains are freaking tiny. I mean, look at that thing. If a salmon can get back upstream to have sex with salmon-chicks on that much brain, how come my highly evolved mammal-brain can’t figure out phone numbers?

Here’s an(other) example.

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I’m typing this post from my old bedroom on Christmas Eve. There is an awkward thing that I will get to later on, but first there are two things I want to mention about how my blog is going these days. Sometimes I wonder if I can keep this up for much longer. I mean, I have to run out of things to talk about, right? Then I remember these two facts:

1. I have a list of old awkward things I want to get to someday, but it keeps getting longer as I think of a thing to write about more than once a week.

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I’ve been tagged. And, frankly, it’s about time I let you behind the curtain a little bit.

Also, don’t be surprised if you notice that a Christmas Miracle has happened to this website the next time you stop by. We’re turning it up to 11 over here at Awkward Things, just in time for the new year. Okay. On to the five things!

Thing One:

I’ve had the songs “I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire” (made famous by Horace Heidt and His Musical Knights in 1941) and “Chances Are” (the first #1 hit for Johnny Mathis) intermittently stuck in my head since around 1997, when the Clover Hill High School show choir performed them together as a medley ballad in their competition show. I was in the band that accompanied them at competitions, but, since they did this part of the show a capella, I didn’t have to play and could just listen.

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“Do you mind genuinely kissing each other on stage? Because we could do fake stage kisses if you want, but it just wouldn’t be the same.”

It’s the early summer of 1998. My junior year of high school was just about over. I had just found out that I had won the male lead in the fall musical. The drama teacher had gathered me together with Female Lead to have a discussion about what that means.

Apparently, that means kissing.

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About a week and a half ago, I was at a bar with a friend. He’s married, and, lucky for you, I’m not.

A girl sits down with us who my friend knows and who I don’t. She is definitely pretty, but she seems really distracted. I wonder to myself: what is she distracted about? She looks over at my friend and asks the worst question ever.

“Do you think I’m good looking?”

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