i wish i wasn't so embarrassed about being embarrassed.
i think it all goes back to the days when i was just this geeky tomboy nerdgirl who sat in front of her computer all day learning basic on the atari 800 or playing star raiders. for most of my waking hours i would just sit there by myself in front of that damn computer and regularly fail to interact with most of society. sure, i had my crappy compuserve email address (which consisted of a horrendous combination of fifteen numerical digits separated by a comma somewhere), but those other people with email accounts were just as alone in front of their green glowing screen as i was. what was worse was that they were hundreds of miles away in some state that i only knew about through tv sitcoms.
the few face-to-face friends i *did* manage to have were other androgynous nerdgirls like myself who hated our parochial school and all the beautiful, popular people who hated us. every day we would all walk home after school, drink a liter of coke and watch raiders of the lost ark.
every day.
did you know that the plane that indy jumps onto when he's being chased by the angry tribe is named "ob-cpo?" i swear. watch the video and hit pause right when you see the first shot of the plane.
i'm too embarrassed to even tell you what else i know about that movie.
on the days when we weren't watching raiders of the lost ark, we would watch star wars. whether it was star wars or raiders, we'd watch the movie with our standard one-liners and responses to what the characters were saying, turning it into our version of the rocky horror picture show before we even knew what rocky horror was all about.
every day my two friends and i would sit around, by ourselves, being nerds because that's what we were and that's all we knew. we would go to sci-fi conventions where i would dress up like the 4th dr. who (tom baker) and immerse myself in the exact environment that william shatner gets angry about on saturday night live.
none of this behavior really contributed to me turning out to be an overly gregarious and outgoing kinda person. i have friends who can strike up conversations with strangers at parties with absolute ease and it just boggles me. how did they do that? how did they know what to talk about?
you are finding yourself in the middle of this insane rant because the guy at the coffeeshop gave me a compliment today. regardless of whether the compliment is "hey you're cute!" or "hey, i like the way you juggle!" i never fail to become completely flabbergasted. i wish i could come with up some really catchy response or do something other than just stand there and look like a deer in headlights. jory says i should just say "thank you." but whenever i try that approach, the scene invariably turns out to be:
person: hey, i like the way you juggle!
me: thank you!
then i stand there looking like a deer in headlights. it doesn't really resolve my initial problem at all, it just extends it to a more painful length of time. great. now what?
isn't there some class or drug i can take that can turn me into one of those people that knows what to say? ecstasy only lasts four or five hours and makes me look like a fool in front of sober people. liquor makes me dizzy and i don't want prozac because i'm not depressed, just a little geeky.
now mind you, i'm not a total freak of nature. i can interact socially pretty well, but i just get so embarrassed so easily - then i get embarrassed about being embarrassed. eventually it devolves into a horrible downward spiral that turns me completely ocd and nervous. it makes me just want to sit in front of my computer all day and watch the glowing warm glow of my lcd panel.
mmmmmm... warm...
all words (c) filmfatale industries 2000