Blogatron

Extend. Retract!

This morning on my way to work I encountered a woman pushing a stroller, approaching some garbage cans that were strewn across the sidewalk. "Oh! I will be helpful," I said to myself, "and move these cans out of the way so that she can pass by." And so I grabbed one and pushed it out toward the street, smiling helpfully, as she grabbed another one and put it behind the fence...hey wait a minute. Those were her very own garbage cans, that she was here to put away, that I was moving out of her reach, smiling helpfully all the while.

A normal person would have said "Oh sorry! I thought you were just trying to get past," and given her her garbage can back. But this did not occur to me. Instead I grinned my ever-more-frozen helpful grin and scurried past silently, mortified and ashamed at this horrific and unsolveable faux pas, as she no doubt wondered why this freak was making faces at her and moving her garbage cans around, what the hell?

Social awkwardness haunts me, freezes me right up, and I never have the presence of mind to say the thing that will make it all better. Like the bus driver who clearly thinks I am someone else, someone with whom he has a jovial chatty relationship: "Hey! That was a short trip!" he called out as he took my ticket the last time I headed up to see the Dad. A normal person would say "I think you have me confused with somebody else," and laugh it off, and maybe form a jovial chatty relationship of their own. But me! How can I tell the bus driver that he is wrong! So awkward! So instead I found myself trying to make his comment make sense as though he had actually said it knowing that I was me, as though this would make him feel better. I mumbled something incomprehensible about yeah, I make a lot of day trips, be back tonight, hey hey, okay, which makes no sense at all and now the bus driver thinks that whatever poor woman he mistook me for is completely out of her gourd, and a little standoffish to boot.

I collect these little moments and keep them, to pore over later: so many failures, so much silliness I've generated. The problem is that I am so concerned with the immediate issues - form words, don't shriek in terror, keep standing upright, etc. - that I kind of forget to just breathe deeply and say what I mean, and that most people really aren't looking for an opportunity to point and say "Ha! Moron! You took part in a momentary misunderstanding! I shun you, and call upon others to do the same!" I mean, no one is ever going to do that, but I always act as if they will, and always realize too late that that is what I did, and resolve not to be pointlessly sneaky next time, except that if history is any guide I of course will be.

As a further example of my neurotic obsession with every human interaction, I have been mulling over the phone calls I received this morning from Dad's Soothing Image Center. I kind of let an innocent nurse have it when she accidentally told me about yet another Suprise! doctor appointment. I have been trying and trying to get the Soothing Image Center to tell me when the Dad has appointments, apparently to no avail. And so I did some bitching to this part-time nurse, who of course did not schedule the appointment herself, so who can be held accountable? The plan now is to put a note In The Book informing future appointment-setters that they should always call me; apparently they don't as a matter of course, because "the families usually don't want to know" about such things, which, entirely its own novel's worth of *sigh* to that. We'll see how that goes; my previous experiences with In The Book do not fill me with confidence.

So I was feeling kind of bad about busting out the snippy on this nurse, but: whoa back up there. After I got over the initial "grr appointments stomp stomp stomp oops sorry I yelled" thing, I remembered that the whole reason I got this call at all was because she had noticed the Suprise! appointment In The Book, scheduled for 3:00, when "all her people" go home. So she was hoping that I might be wanting to accompany the Dad to the doctor, since it would be hard for her to coordinate an aide to do so.

Now, let's say for the benefit of the doubt that I am kind of making up the implied guilt of "the families usually don't want to know" and the "maybe you would like to go with your dad [like a good daughter would]." Let's assume that those are my issues. Still. What? Did you just call me to ask if I would maybe like to come do your job, since it's proving inconvenient for you? Did you really do that? Am I crazy, or how many kinds of wildly inappropriate is that?

So in the space of ten minutes or so between the phone call and the garbage cans, I went from grrr to feeling bad about the grrr to thinking that I should maybe upgrade to a good solid RAAAAH! If I think about this too much more, and how likely is it that I won't, I will probably either be sending this woman a gift basket or off sharpening a knife somewhere. And in the meantime, I haven't had a free second to worry about the implications of the garbage can incident, and its possible effect on world peace, so who knows what will happen if I don't get busy fretting about that. It is a hard row I hoe, my pretties, and don't you forget it.

Posted by hilatron at March 22, 2005 11:54 AM | TrackBack