Too much awkward.

Awkward situations are unfortunately part of everyday life. Fortunately there are a few guidelines to help you make these situations more bearable. Most people try to make the best of these situations by finding the funny, while others avoid recognizing that there is an awkward situation at all. But, if you’re like any normal person, you’ve been faced with unexpected situations that strip you of your dignity, raise your blood pressure, and leave you dumbfounded – trying to find the nearest escape route away from the public eye. Luckily, awkward situations happen to everyone. Your average Joe, celebrities… even former President Bush faced an embarrassing moment when he threw up on the Japanese Prime Minister, Former President Ford fell on his face leaving Air Force One, and I’m sure everyone remembers Jessica Simpson’s “Chicken of the Sea” fiasco. In fact, just the other day I had an awkward situation occur when an ex-boyfriend that I literally have not talked to in two years popped up on my Facebook and told me that he got married and was thinking about having kids with his wife. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with that information… Which brings me to my first point:

 Exes. 

There are two main types of awkward situations when dealing with Exes: The Direct interaction and the indirect interaction. The direct interaction occurs when you are face to face with your ex. Such as when a teacher assigns partners, you go out to eat and your ex is the waiter/waitress… basically when you’re thrown into an unavoidable situation with an ex-significant other. 

The solution: Try and be a civilized human being and act like you’re the happiest person on the face of the planet. Ignore the awkward as best you can and busy yourself with horribly funny text messages and check Facebook often. Distractions are key.

The Indirect interaction is easier to handle. If you receive a message from an ex that you haven’t heard from in a while the obvious thing would be to not respond. But if you’re not smart enough to think of that first(like me) and find yourself in a conversation that you really don’t care to be having but  don’t want to be mean… use lots of question marks and exclamation marks. That’s why they were created.

The next awkward situation I will be addressing is the Foot in Mouth. Anytime something inappropriate, rude, or hurtful comes out of your mouth before your brain can give it an okay it can be categorized as The Foot in Mouth.  This is perhaps the most shameful of all awkward situations. It is difficult to recover because an awkward silence usually follows.

The Solution: IMMEDIATELY after you realize that you have humiliated yourself, direct the attention to someone or something else. Change the subject.  You can also try the confusion method. Ex: I was wedding dress shopping with my best friend and she asked me what I thought about feathers. Apparently, feathers are a big deal for her and she loves them. I don’t.  Using the confuse method, I avoided the awkward silence immediately after and recovered.  “Oh, I thought you told me you didn’t. Didn’t you? Didn’t you say that on the way down here? Hmm... I must have misunderstood you. I know you will look beautiful whatever you choose!” 

Unfortunately, I am known for my trips, falls, and other mishaps. I’ve had a lot of experience in this area. Tripping and falling is another humiliating experience, but with a good attitude and the right recovery you can only care a little bit like me! There are several different types of falling. The public fall, the sports fall, and that one fall you’d just like to forget.

The public fall is when you’re at an important event. Graduation, awards day… some place that falling would be top 5 of the worst things that can happen. If you’ve fallen at any one of those events (raise hand) you must laugh it off, ignore the red that has surely come over your face and, laugh with anyone that tries to bring it up later. Or you can bow. That seems to work too.

The sports fall: The sports fall gives you a little leeway. You can usually pass it off as hustle. But if you find yourself in a situation where you can’t… Like after hitting your first homerun you tripped over third base and fell face first in front of the other team’s dugout, the recovery might be a little trickier. The solution: If you’re the center of attention and there is no way to avoid the stares of every person in that vicinity, acknowledge the awkward. Chances are it will be completely silent after you’ve created such an awkward situation for yourself. Come right out and say “well, that was embarrassing” and continue on your way. If you show that you’re completely okay with embarrassment others are less likely to bring it up.

The one that you’d like to forget.  This fall is the most humiliating. You have shamed yourself at the highest level possible. You may have fallen down a hill in front of hundreds of people. You might have caused a multi-person pile up; you could have fallen in the parking lot and caused a traffic jam because your backpack was so heavy that you couldn’t get up…

The Solution: There is none. Good luck. 

Responding to someone that isn’t talking to you is another unfortunate awkward situation that you may find yourself in. This one is a tricky situation to get out of. You must be extremely skilled if you want to come out of this without the other person realizing that you’ve made a fool of yourself.

 The solution: Don’t allow the awkward silence to set in. Continue to respond to someone invisible behind you. When the person that you actually responded to looks at you, create an awkward situation for them and make them feel shame! 

The next situation I will address is dealing with adults. Any embarrassing or awkward situations dealing with authoritative figures is extremely horrifying. There are many different situations that you can face but I will focus on two main issues:  Unfortunate timing during movie scenes and miscommunications.

Everyone has had the unfortunate experience of having your parents walk in during that one inappropriate scene during the movies. Or you have had to sit there beside your mom or dad while the actors are makin’ babies. I find that to be incredibly awkward.

The solution: Become extremely interested in your phone. Send out a mass text and pray to the good lord above that someone responds. And do not make eye contact. If you don’t acknowledge the scene, it didn’t happen. Simple as that. 

My final point is miscommunications between adults. These situations can result in groundings, all out yelling matches or in my case – a parent teacher conference.  This was perhaps the most awkward situation that I have ever been in. My sophomore year I had a teacher that singled me out and decided that I was a horrible person. It began with small things. She called me to her desk and then she called me out in the hall after accusing me of talking about her. It transitioned into her coming to my desk and writing me notes asking what was wrong with me and my family. She would then send emails to my other teachers saying that I wanted her dead. The end result was her kicking me out of class after saying that “I ruined her day and her class and she didn’t want to see me anymore.” We had a parent teacher conference and she spent the entire time crying saying that she didn’t know what to do because I was rude and disrespectful. Yeah. I know. 

The solution: Be the bigger person. Adults hate being wrong – especially in front of other adults. Agree. Say you’re sorry. Say that you’ll try harder to sit in the corner and not speak and not make below a 96. And then do everything possible to not have that teacher again. 

In conclusion I have told you about several awkward situations and what I believe is the best way to deal with them. However, the main thing you must remember is that everyone deals with awkward situations. Everyone gets humiliated and the best thing to do is embrace your inner awkward. The easier you can laugh at yourself the easier it is to deal with other people laughing at you.

How I ended face down in a ditch on the side of the road.

My parents aren't strict, but through my high school days they had a very strict sense of right and wrong. Doing homework? Good. Stealing road signs? Don't even fucking think about it.
As I got into my first few months of college the rules that I had to follow during high school apparently went to shit. I came home one weekend to find that my sister had a HUGE road sign sitting in the middle of her bedroom. I just stood there in awe because she had it placed in the center of her room for all the world to see. I asked her what on God's green earth was that doing where our dad could see it. She shrugged her shoulders and said "He says it's okay. If I get caught I have to pay the fine myself. Whatever. I'm a pro."
 
Uh.. what?

This is the same guy that took my phone away for 2 days for saying 'suck.'

Anyway, I had always wanted my very own road sign. I began plotting and I knew where I could get the one I wanted. It was a giant BUMP sign. A few days went by and on a clear night at about 11 o'clock I asked my sister to go with me to get a sign because it's not easy to do it by yourself. We got in her little 4 cylinder car(because that's important) and drove off. She told me that if it was going to be difficult to get off it was okay because she had tools. My sister has sign stealing tools stashed in her car. She's a pro.
I guess I should make it clear that I would never, EVER steal a stop sign and wouldn't really steal someones street sign either because I know they are expensive to pay for. I would take ones that had fallen over or had been left by road work crews.

We got to the where it was. Since it was so late I didn't figure that being right on the side of the road would matter too much. Wrong. We drove by several times making sure no one was coming and my sister turned off her lights and stopped in the highway to let me out. I ran over to the ditch where the sign had fallen over. I didn't a bit more get to picking the damn thing up (which was a LOT bigger than I had anticipated. Especially since it still had the fucking poles attached to it) and a car came around the curve. I hit the fucking ground. My feet involuntarily curled under me and I dropped like a sack of bricks. Face down in the ditch. I was like one of those fainting goats. I'm probably being too generous by giving it the title of a ditch. It was more like a little bitty dip where flat ground meets bank. You couldn't successfully hide a baseball bat in that damn thing.

This is pretty much where I was trying to hide all 5 foot 8 of me. Only with more thorns and less high grass.

Anyway, while I'm there, face down the fucking dimple on the side of the road all I hear is a fucking baby VROOOOOOOOOOOOM coming out of her little 4 cylinder engine and then it's gone. There's more power in a weed-eater. But it doesn't change the fact that she floored the shit out of that and LEFT. ME. THERE. So the car goes by and I peeked up to she if I could see our car and I'll be damned if another one isn't coming. I buried my head as far down as I could which was hard because I was in a clusterfuck of bushes covered in thorns. Finally after what seemed like AGES the road was quiet again. My sister pulls back up and the window is down. She has tears rolling down her face. She popped the trunk and she told me(as much as she could muster between snorts) to hurry up and put the sign in the back. I tried to pick it up and as soon as I did a fucking dog comes out of nowhere. It's snarling and barking and it locks in on me and starts galloping my way. My sister sees this and floors her car again leaving me to drop the sign and run down the road after her in a pair of boots. I dove into the passenger side and glared at her. I was covered in thorns, tree paraphernalia, mud, and I was bleeding from various places of my body. She thought that was the funniest shit ever. I just hope that's the last time I end up face down in a ditch on the side of the road.

It's that time of year.

The forecast for the next 8 days calls for one giant shitstorm with a 95% chance of headaches and loss of sleep. A clusterfuck is moving in near the beginning of next week and it appears to be slow moving; leaving a trail of destruction, chaos, and insanity in it's path.

-Welcome to finals week.

It doesn't help that all your professors believe that their class IS the center of the universe. What? You're taking 4 other classes besides mine?! WELL WHO GIVES A FUCK.

I figure the only way that I'm going to get it all done is it I don't shit, shave, or sleep.
I've got a stress related eye twitch and a head ache already.

If Betty White can do this so can I

I recently acquired a Twitter. I sent my first Tweet.
#whatthefuckdoIdonow?    <-- is that even how that works?
Fail. :(

The Curse.

My parents are pretty great people. My dad has always wanted my sister and me to have better than he did. It doesn't matter what it is, he just wants us to have better.
I think I was around 10 when I started looking at cars on the highway. I would look at mom and tell her I wanted this car and then it would change to that car and so on. When I turned fifteen I started looking at them on the internet. And bless my dad's heart.. I chose a mustang. I just had to have a mustang. Mustang this, mustang that. I'm pretty sure my mom hated me a week after I made that decision. She was totally against it but I am daddy's little girl. He talked her into it and about a month before my 16th birthday we found one and went and got it. It was perfect. Lemon yellow. It was love at first sight. We brought it home and I was told I couldn't drive it until I was 16. That was a long month..

About two weeks after I got my license I was making a food run for a camp I was working at. I was going to have to pull across the road to make it to Subway. I didn't see anything once I got in the turning lane and I went on across. I heard this screeching sound and then the BAM! My passenger side door had an SUV stuck in it. I immediately started squalling. There were two people in the car and the woman came around and opened my door. She asked me if I was okay and I told her I was. She was pretty mean about it, though. And then she told me the words I never want to hear again in my entire life. "I'm sorry, but you should know that you just hit a cop." A cop. A mother fucking cop. I lost it. The woman asked me what my name was and I told her. I included my dad's name too because he used to be a cop before I was born. She got nice real quick after that. I called my dad and he called someone to come sign for me so they wouldn't have to take me away in the freaking ambulance because he was about 40 minutes away. So there I sat in the middle of the road with an ambulance, a fire truck, 5 cars that had stopped because they knew me. It was a fucking party.

A higher insurance bill and a new car door later I was driving home from my best friends house. Let's call her.. B. B had gotten up early to go do something boyfriend related so I woke up and was heading back to my house. I had stopped pulling across the road after my first accident so I was going the back way. There is a little 4 way stop on the back side of town. I pulled up first and this car pulled up after me but he was on my left. My right of way. I went and got about halfway through when he hit me. I don't know what he was thinking or if he just didn't notice the bright yellow mustang going in front of him but he hit me. Right smack in the middle of my car. I was SO mad. I mean, it's one thing to not see a car but to have one right in front of you at a 4 way? Come on, man. I called my dad. He was out of town.. again, and then I called B. The conversation went something like this:

B: Hello?

Me: SOMESONOFABITCHMOTHERFUCKERJUSTRANTHEFUCKING4WAYINTOMYDRIVERSIDEDOOR!!!!!

B: Uh.. what?

Me: SOMEBODY. JUST. FUCKING. RAN. INTO. MY. MOTHER. FUCKING. CAR. DAMN. IT.

B: Are you okay!?

Me: YES I'M FUCKING OKAY. DON'T I SOUND FUCKING OKAY? I'M FUCKING OKAY EXCEPT MY FUCKING DRIVERS SIDE DOOR IS FUCKING SMASHED IN. FUCK!

B: Calm down. It's okay.

Me: I KNOW IT'S OKAY. EXCEPT THE SHIT IT'S NOT BECAUSE THIS IS THE SECOND FUCKING ACCIDENT I'VE BEEN IN AND I HAVEN'T FUCKING HAD MY DAMN LICENSE FOR 4 MONTHS.

B: .....

Me: .............

B: I'll stop by your house later.


I had to drive around for like 3 months with my drivers side door caved in because the insurance company are a bunch of slackers. I had gotten it fixed and a couple weeks later I was going to our high school to watch my sister play basketball. It was a big rivalry game and the team we were playing was really rough. Their point guard was a little bitch. She slammed our PG's head. -lets call her Em- on the floor and gave her a concussion. It was a long tiring game but we came out the winner. After it was over a friend of mine- let's call him Ronald- asked me to drive him to his car out town. Another friend of ours had been sledding and hit a bank and got a concussion. He wanted to go to the emergency room to see her. We pulled out of the high school to go north and I got into the passing lane. About 60 yards from where you pull out is a turning lane so you can go back south. It was dark and I was nearing up to about 55 mph. I got close to the turning lane and I could see the other team's school bus. One blink it was in the turning lane. Two blinks it was in the passing lane. Three blinks I had slammed on my breaks and driven my car up under the back of the bus. I heard this horrible screeching sound and then a lot hissing and popping and then silence. Or maybe it was loud. I don't know. I had just slammed my car into a school bus.
I looked over at Ronald to make sure he was okay. He said that he was and then he called our friend, Shine, that was still at the game. While that was going on the other team's families stopped on side of the road and ran over to help us. They were super nice to us and very concerned. They helped us out of the car and stood with us until my parents got there. I was crying again. Not because I was hurt. Once I had gotten out of my car I looked in the road and there was a big hunk of metal sitting on it. The remnants of the front of my car:(.

My parents arrived and there was a lot of hugging and a lot of reassuring. The ambulance arrived soon after that. That was probably the thing I hated most. I don't like being the center of attention and EVERYONE was staring at me and I was the main focus. The EMT that was on call that night.. well let's just say I knew her by name at this point. She wanted to make sure I didn't have any broken bones so she strapped me in the seat inside the ambulance (I was NOT going to lay on the bed) and took me to the hospital. There were no broken bones. Just a few bruises on my knee caps from where my knees hit the steering wheel and the dash. I went home and my mom gave my phone back to me which she had taken away because I was 'distracted' when the doctor tried to talk to me. Whatever. The first thing I did was text Em. All I said was "I got them back for you."

Later I was told about what happened in the gym while I was sitting in the middle of the road. Apparently some people that knew me had watched the accident and called my parents at the same time Ronald had called Shine. Shine had pretty much jumped the bleachers and sprinted across to the other side to tell my family. She said "It was the weirdest thing. Right before I could tell them the entire section of (insertlastnamehere) stood up in unison and sprinted out the door. I've never seen anything like it."

:(

My car was totaled but it wasn't my fault. I drive a 4 Runner now. It's nothing like my mustang. It's not as fast, it doesn't have good gas mileage, but I haven't been in a wreck yet. Knock on wood. My friends would come up and tell me 'The curse of the yellow mustang is over.. but I'm still not riding with you.'

Pretty bird.

I came home this weekend to spend time with my family. There's never a dull moment with them around. True to my expectations, my mom just yelled at me to come outside. My dad wanted to show my sister and me something. I walked out the front door and he was holding a bird. We don't own a bird.

There have been several occasions where one has flown into our glass door and stunned itself. I've gone outside, picked it up, and 'nursed' it back to health. It usually only takes a few minutes and then they repay me by shitting on my hand and flying away.

This wasn't one of those cases. It was completely healthy! And so pretty! We didn't know what it was so my mom went to look it up. While she was gone we had to find somewhere to put it. Because we don't own a bird we don't have any cages that are bird appropriate. Until I saw the fire pit. If you ignore the fact that it's built for holding fires it's pretty much the perfect bird cage! We cleaned it out really good and put the bird down in it. He seems happy.

Makeshift bird cage.

My mom used to work with a woman whose husband is a park ranger. He knows his animals. I sent a picture to her and she told me it was a parakeet. A blue parakeet to be exact. Those are not native to my county. They are not even native to my state. That lead me to the conclusion that my dad caught someones pet bird.  Dad is so excited about it. He was all "We're keeping this until someone calls about it! I caught it and it's from the wild! I had to remind him that it wasn't exactly from the wild and there was no telling where it was from because birds have wings and they can travel long distances, but that didn't dampen his spirits. The bird is now living on my front porch. In the fire pit.

I'm naming him Petey.

Have your balls dropped yet?

As an art major I am subjected to strange things every day. I'm not accustom to having someone walk in the room and the instructor be all "Oh, we're just looking at naked pictures." That's strange. But I can deal with it. If naked pictures were the only thing that I've seen in this past week I would be a happy camper.


On my first day of 2D Design our professor sat us down, gave us our syllabus and told us to come into the projector room because she wanted to show us a video. First we watched this:

That was probably one of the strangest things I had seen next to a Lady Gaga video or the text my friend sent me of that girl fucking a horse. I mean, who ties people up and makes them stare at shadow puppets? That's a different level of crazy. And why does the narrator keep saying what he thinks the characters should think? Is he that fucking insightful? Well come on down Dr. Fucking Phil! Tell me how what you think I would feel after being chained in a cave all my life and having to watch shadow puppets all day!

It took me a couple of days to finally forget about how bizarre that video was. And then we were showed another one. I'm almost positive that this will follow me to my grave.

                                                     Mathew Barney: The Cremaster

Our professor was all excited and she goes "Guess what it means!!" Some guessed a baby in the womb and others guessed something about sex. It was in the ball park.. I guess.  

"The project is filled with anatomical allusions to the position of the reproductive organs during the embryonic process of sexual differentiation: Cremaster 1 represents the most "ascended" or undifferentiated state, Cremaster 5 the most "descended" or differentiated. The cycle repeatedly returns to those moments during early sexual development in which the outcome of the process is still unknown.." 

 Yeah. I totally would have guessed that one. So.. basically this is about someone's balls dropping. Or not dropping. That is the question. And it's supposed to be about his dreams? I don't know. I don't think I will ever know. Apparently there are five three hour long videos out there floating around in cyber space. And in art galleries. Maybe if I watched those I could understand what it means. Most likely I will still believe that this is some pervert taking way too many drugs and having a lot of free time. I appreciate art. I do. That's why I'm an art major.. but there are just some things that will never make sense to me. And the Cremaster Cycle is on top of that list.

In other news: I was laying on my bed typing this post and my air conditioner shot out what looked to be rocks. It was loud and it scared the shit out of me. You know that sound your vacuum cleaner makes when you suck up a bunch of rocks? Multiply that by about 15 and you will get how loud it was. I sat there for a moment to let my heart rate return to normal and then it did it again. I got up to investigate and it was ice. My air conditioner is fucking frozen. It shoots out ice. That would be good if I needed a cold drink, but I need a cold room. I'm going to have to let it thaw out. Because that's what air conditioners are meant for.