I hesitated writing that, because there are certainly some people who will just instantly start whining and saying "you're so full of yourself," blah blah blah. So I'll just take the wind out of your sails by saying that I mean that in a non-arrogant, self-deprecating way. And if you do send me that email, it means you clearly didn't read beyond the title. so bite me. I'm in a bad mood this morning.
I am not the most naturally graceful person in the world. This comes across both physically and personally. I am extremely awkward.
Physically, I have this theory (completely scientific) that my sense of spacial reasoning, as it pertains to my body in the world, stopped developing when I was about 12. At the age of 12, I was about 5'5" tall and weighed somewhere around 87 pounds (I know, it's hard to believe, but I really was a knock-kneed thing). My brain doesn't seem to understand that I've grown both up and out significantly since then. Add to that the fact that I flail my arms around spasmodically, and with a 70 inch wingspan, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Socially, I have always been incredibly awkward. I have a habit of saying the most bizarre things that seemed to fit in my brain until they come out of my mouth and then they just sound completely absurd. I was also a bullied child (I still hate you, Lara Vance, and I hope all of your kids cry every single day when they get home from school about how everyone is mean to them, just like I did when I wanted to be your friend and you wouldn't let me sit at your table at school lunch and I had to eat in the bathroom. Yes. Just like in Mean Girls. It happened to me too) and everyone called me ugly my whole life and barked at me and told me I was a dog. So I pretty much grew up assuming everyone was making fun of me at all times.
I also grew up in the country, and was basically alone for most of the time. While this did wonders for my imagination (probably it was too good for my imagination, for I struggle with its overactivity to this day), it made me even more socially inept than nature made me.
Combine this with my 5 cats and it's a wonder I'm married, huh?
So there you have it: I am a completely clumsy, flailing, awkward, weird mess. This would be perfectly fine if I never had to encounter people I've never met who know me from my online persona.
And so it is that inevitably, whenever I encounter a reader in real life, I will do something completely and ridiculously embarrassing. Compounding all of this is the fact that the more I think about my clumsiness, the worse it becomes.
It would naturally happen that every once in awhile, I meet a reader or twitter follower while I'm out and about or waiting tables. Whenever this happens, an enormous feeling of dread washes over me, because it always means that something horribly humiliating is about to happen.
Here's an example:
- this follows in with a karmic reaction which happens whenever I yell at a coworker. I used to have a coworker, a server assistant, who was a lot like me in the bull-in-a-china-shop department. His contributing habit to clumsiness was that his head and body were never pointed in the same direction. I frequently found myself saying "JOE!! Head and body in the same direction!!" It was on this particular day when I discovered I should never say that, because it means that sometime in that shift I will fall down in grand fashion (I just re-proved it about 2 weeks ago). So I had yelled at Joe. It was a busy night and hot. I was sweaty and looked precisely like an adolescent pig, what with my face all round and pink and sweaty (this was before having my thyroid treated. now i still get all sweaty and gross, but it's not quite as bad as it used to be). So already I'm looking fabulous. Plus I am waiting on not one but two tables of readers I've only just met for the first time, plus an old coworker who I hadn't seen in awhile and since she had seen me, I had put on quite a bit of weight (because I've been mean, and gotten horribly cruel satisfaction out of seeing others put weight on, I know that I deserve the same derision), and I was already feeling embarrassed. So here I am: plump, sweating, busy - seriously weeded, actually, because in addition to always doing something embarrassing, readers always seem to come on the busiest nights, just so that I can further humiliate myself by providing really crappy service. I am standing at a table talking and see that a foodrunner is coming around the corner to drop food at the table. In preparation to allow the foodrunner access to the table, I make the fatal error: I back away from the table without looking behind me. It just so happens, at that exact moment, Joe the assistant is also walking behind me, in a hurry. I back directly into him and somehow I fell onto him and we manage to fall in grand, and I mean grand fashion. Huge fashion. Like, my shoes fell off. Of course the entire dining room fell silent. To add insult to injury, I was on the second floor of the restaurant, so the sound of my bulk succumbing to gravity was magnified by the fact that there was nothing to absorb the rumble.
My coworker, who was downstairs at the time, was kind enough to inform me that my fall sounded like a herd of elephants running through the dining room (I miss you Crumpet, there's no one here to keep my on my toes!!)
And so, be aware that should we ever meet, I am certain to spill water on you, drop a plate of food in your lap, fall onto your table, snort milk from my nose, or spastically pour a drink on myself for no apparent reason other than my arms moved of their own free will. Because that is just the kind of girl I am.
Full of grace.
(ps i love you babe, even when you call me princess grace)
