A Recovery Plan for Every Awkward Situation
We’re going to get through this together
We fart by accident while we’re laughing; we fart by accident while we’re coughing. Tampons fly from our purses and we try to sign receipts with them; the dog barfs right into the middle of a dinner party. We ask after the health of relatives whose funerals we attended not that long ago. We welcome new folks to the neighborhood only to find out they’ve been living next door to us for years. “You look vaguely familiar — do we know each other?” we say, to the person who turns out to be Lou Reed, who turns out to be John Lithgow, who turns out to be the president of the college where we work. We say “thank you” when someone says “hi;” we say “you too” when the waiter says “enjoy your dinner,” when the attendant says, “have a good flight,” when anybody says, “happy birthday.” And then we inwardly die of awkwardness.
These are true stories, all of them collected after I put out a call on Facebook for people to share their awkward experiences. And oh my god, did they. My friends and I laughed for days as their anecdotes came rolling in.
But before you get to a place where you can laugh at yourself, you have to recover. Here’s how to bounce back from three of the main Awkwardness Archetypes: uncomfortable conversational mishaps, weird gross physical…
