I was standing at the meat cooler at the back of Food Lion, sifting through different types of ground beef: 93/7, 85/15, 80/20. Tubes in perfectly portioned pounds. Packages with a little more, a little less, a bit here and there, weighed out. I was concentrating.
Last week, seeing that my team was suffering though malaise because of snow days and a general inability to just get anyone on the phone so we could, y'know, do our jobs, I decided the thing I could do would be to cook something. We can have a team lunch! I thought. It'll be awesome!
So, a week ago, I sent an email out to my whole team titled "ITALIAN FEAST!" and now there's a conference room booked and my coworkers are bringing sides and oh yeah, I remembered this afternoon...I should probably go get the stuff to make the lasagna.
I was getting ready to make a decision when this perfectly pleasant man decided to strike up a conversation.
Now, mind you, at this point in my life I'm usually fine in random social interactions. I talk on the phone to 50 strangers every day, for crying out loud. I'm no longer the awkward, shy, bumbling child I used to be. I'm lovely - chatty, even - most of the time. My manager said he wanted to hire me after the first time we spoke on the phone because you just can't fake that.
But sometimes, it's late and I've worked for 10 hours and all I want to do is get out of this store and go home to my dog and curl up away from all human contact and there's a stranger talking to me.
"Umm, I, uh...I'm just looking at them," I stammered, wondering in that moment why I was even nervous.
"I'm usually a this type of guy," he pointed at the 70/30 ground round in the right hand corner of the cooler, "But I know it's not as good for me."
I didn't really know how to respond. It was like I had forgotten how to have a conversation.
Suddenly I was aware that I was blocking almost all the other selections. "Oh, I'm sorry, am I in your way?"
The man looked at me like I had just apologized for existing. "No! I'm just...trying to be friendly."
"Oh, sure!" I answered, and rambled out some long winded explanation about how I was getting beef for a "work thing" and how it was going in a recipe and I just wanted to get the best one...but at that point the more I spoke, the less he seemed to care. The awkwardness hung thick in the air as if an invisible dense fog had enveloped that meat cooler.
I reached back in, shifted one of the packages to the left, grabbed it, and hurried away down the pasta aisle.
There's this thing that Suzanne "Crazy Eyes" does in Orange is the New Black where she hits herself in the temple over and over for being so stupid, and that's just such a perfect representation of how I feel a large portion of the time, I can't even tell you.
I don't get it; I really don't. I can speak to strangers all day and be as smooth as a frog's belly. (Now there's an image.) I can go into a restaurant and strike up a random conversation with the server that spans the hour of a meal. I even bantered with the checkout guy at Food Lion like ten minutes later!
And yet, sometimes, I get the better of myself and forget how to speak. Or think I'm in someone's way. Or apologize for existing.
I can only hope, as I get older, that this will happen less and less...or else I'm going to have to start smacking myself in the temple in public. That should help the awkwardness, right?
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