On Awkwardness...

So being that I am the Queen of Randomness, that by default also makes me the Queen of Awkward Moments. I have a terribly unstable history of saying/doing the absolute wrong thing at the wrong time. Which is kinda bad being that a big part of my job is to say the right thing to people at the right time. I think the worst thing about how I handle awkward moments is I tend to try to highlight them so people can see even more clearly just how awkward I can be. It's a weird defense mechanism. Having studied Freud and object relations in school, I've spent a lot of time lately trying to figure out when this all started and what stage of my personal development it could be attributed to. Looking into the past, I realize that up until I left high school and went away to college, I was pretty much a fly on the wall. I didn't speak up in class, I wore frumpy clothes, and outside of my group of friends, I generally didn't dare talk to people who didn't speak to me first.

Getting out of my parents' home and going away to college was perhaps the best thing that could have happened to me. It truly gave me the room to "blossom" and become a more confident person. I found my niche in the theater department and worked my way up from bit parts to one of the leading ladies. I got involved with student media and found a family there. I found myself speaking up in class and actually (yikes) voicing my opinion. I even began to sing karaoke on a regular basis! And once I got out of college, I married my high school sweetheart and best friend and we started a fantastic life together. I had officially come into my own. Working my way into the world of nonprofits, getting my masters, and now having started my Dream Job, I should feel spectacular, right?

Well in general, yes, I do. But.....................the awkward moments, they just don't stop coming. And they've been coming since I hit that "blossoming" stage. I'll just give a small example. You know how, in class, sometimes you will move your chair and it sounds like a fart? You don't want everyone to think you farted so instead of just ignoring it and hoping nobody noticed, you move your chair around more, hoping to emulate the same sound 2 or 3 times so everyone knows it's really just your chair. Sometimes it works and sometimes it just sounds like you can't control your bowels. I have problems "controlling my bowels" on a daily basis.

It's difficult to gracefully deal with an awkward situation because you never really know when they're going to happen, right? But I watch some of my wonderful friends deal with them so gracefully that oftentimes you would never even know it had been an awkward moment. This is definitely my Achilles heel. I wish somebody would teach a class on how to handle these things.

So as per my love of highlighting my awkward moments, here are just a few particularly spectacular ones:

• My grandparents told me they had changed their email to ******@cox.com. So just to confirm what the actual email address was, I said "oh, you mean c-o-c-k-s dot com?"
• This is a good one from high school - I was reading out loud in biology class and read the word "micro-organisms" as "micro-orgasms." I was still hearing about that one two years later.
• A dear friend in college made me a vase as a wedding shower gift. When I opened it I said, "Oh, this is beautiful. What is it?" There's just no way to remedy that one. But she handled it beautifully.
• This one is from 6th grade (so maybe it started a bit earlier). I showed up for my confirmation wearing a black and hot pink flowery dress. EVERYONE else was wearing white. In addition to that, I had spent the prior day in the sun for 8 hours with no sunscreen so my skin was as red as a lobster. I really should've just stayed at home. God would've understood. This particular incident spurred a trend of wearing my awesomely cute clothes at spectacularly wrong times. That's a whole different post for another awkward day.
• At a United Way conference a few years ago, there was a luau with an open bar. I must have had six or seven glasses of wine because before I knew it, I was up on stage singing "Like a Virgin" on karaoke in a not-so-virginal manner. Later that night I managed to drop my keys in the toilet and forgot about them until the next morning when my boss pointed them out to me. Needless to say, we went home early from that conference.
  
• Racking them up with my new job: 1. Introduced one of my company's VP's at a dinner as "my boss, so be nice to him". He will henceforth be known to everyone who was at the dinner as "Tiffany's boss." 2. Was late for an important meeting because GPS sent me in circles downtown, screamed and swore at the GPS so much that my voice was almost gone when I got there. 3. During our inaugural breakfast (300+ people were there), our CEO was introducing the Atlanta staff and I stood up way before she called my name, realized I was the only one standing, sat back down and then when my name was called, stood up and did this awkward thumbs up thing (I truly want to get my thumbs cut off because I do this so much it nauseates me).

I guess, all in all, I should be happy with where I am in my life (which I AM!) and just accept the awkward moments for what they are. Understanding and practicing ways to handle them gracefully will be important in the future but I guess my quirkiness is part of what makes me well, me.