That’s What Your Mum Said

After a wonderful day in Sydney catching up with friends, family, and watching Christopher Hitchens be generally stupendous, the partner and I caught a very late train home to Newcastle. This train ride takes between 2 1/2 and 3 hours and after a long day in the city can be uncomfortable and sometimes a little concerning – a lot of people enjoy drinking on the train or using it as a place to sleep off their day/night of drinking.

When we were about 20 minutes from home, a man with a large bottle of alcohol covered in a brown paper bag in one hand, and an iPhone in the other, came over to us. He asked in a drunken and slow voice if he could borrow a phone as the battery had died on his. He was very polite however there was something quite unnerving about him. A few weeks ago, I allowed a drunken lady at the train station (at 8 in the morning, mind you) to borrow my mobile, even though I am a poor student and credit is like gold. She chatted with her friend for around five minutes with burps in between and a complete disregard for the credit she was wasting. Needless to say, I was burned. As a result I was immediately wary of this man and my partner looked quite uncomfortable too. This led to me lying and saying that I didn’t have my phone on me, and that my partner and I are students and don’t have much credit on his phone. I apologised profusely and felt really quite bad but at the same time, not bad enough to lend a phone. I must admit I was expecting him to be quite angry however he stayed calm. His eyes betrayed him and I could sense that he was angry and was judging us quite harshly.

He started asking what we are studying and where we lived. We told the truth about the degrees but not where we lived. He told us that his wife studied law like I am currently. He asked about our day and why we were in Sydney, and in order to be polite we asked him what he had been doing. It was a darned scary conversation as he appeared to be working up to something; yet, he wished us well in our studies and said he was sorry for making us feel uncomfortable.

As he left the train he gave us a flyer for the art show he had been to during the day where one of his friends had shown and sold some paintings. He told us that he will be showing his work in a gallery one day. He then hopped off a few stations before ours.

The more I think over this the worse I feel. After all of the fear we felt he appeared to be a genuine man who was just drunk. I immediately judged him as train-folk and assumed would get upset and angry and swear at us. However there is a good chance the discomfort we experienced was useless and led to us being unfriendly and uncharitable.

I am having trouble discerning whether we were unreasonable, or whether this is something a lot of people would have done.

Would you have lent him your phone?

I have an incurable case of foot in mouth disease that often causes awkward, knuckle-biting moments in my life and the lives of those around me.

Whilst camping on the weekend with my entire family (four siblings, four nieces and nephews, parents, partners, aunt, cousins, cousins’ children) and many friends, I made a total dick of myself. A lot of these friends are what I would lovingly term bogans. They are insanely lovely and would do anything for you, but they do enjoy a bourbon whilst singing along to ‘Live’ and wearing socks and thongs. One of my older sisters’ friends is called Ferret (I can only assume due to his small, lithe stature) and he is a hell of a lot of fun. Around the campfire on the final night he came over to get some damper with butter and golden syrup (hells yeah) and lifted his hand to waggle his little finger. To me, after a few glasses of champagne at the afternoon wedding and a few more goons later, it looked as though he had magically bent his little finger all the way down and waggled his knuckle. It was amazing! I had never seen anyone do it before! I got very excited and yelled “whooooooaaaaaaa, do it again Ferret, show me again”! I then hopped up and went over to him whilst looking amazed and excited. I was really confused as to why the partner and my oldest sister were looking embarrassed and saying “oh, Adele, no”. When I got to Ferret, I touched his knuckle to try and figure out how he had bent it over so crazily.

I discovered he wasn’t magic.

I discovered that he has no little finger.

I touched his stump.

Face palm city.

Here are some of the less awkward moments of the weekend. Except for the crocs. They are damned awkward.

Living in a social world as most of us do presents some interesting situations that necessitate a lot of thought and some quick-thinking. Most of the time, if you do manage to move the old cogs things will work in your favour. Weird and awkward situations arise when people just go in willy-nilly and ignore the requirement for some rational deliberation.

There are two blogs I have read recently that touch on this issue. Lilu at Livit Luvit talks about people being idiots and not walking on the right hand side of the path. She is in the Northern hemisphere so I will forgive her; I also totally understand her frustration as I experience it often here when people don’t walk on the left hand side. Over at xkcd they write about urinal protocol and the importance of calculating your position. Obviously as a lady I don’t have this issue however it is something that has always fascinated me and I have queried the partner about at length. What do you do if someone stands next to you when they have other places to go? Would you ever tell them they aren’t being thoughtful if they did? Have you ever accidentally peed on someones shoes?

Two social things that shit me are when I am in a toilet stall in a row of empty toilet stalls and someone goes into the one next to me. Dude, I am trying to poo in peace! The other is when someone places themselves in the seat next to me when I am practically alone in a cinema. I experienced this a few years ago when I was the ONLY person in the theatre waiting to see ‘The Pursuit of Happyness’ (I understood why after I watched it) and an older couple sat directly next to me. Maybe they felt sorry for me, but I was fucking pleased to be there alone – I did not require company. To top it off, the man had a voice synthesizer which was pretty awesome but very distracting. Every time he laughed I had to struggle not to laugh. Awkward.

I try reaaaaaly hard to think about other people in these circumstances and how I would want the situation to play out. If only everyone was as awesome as me.

Which awkward social moments do you believe require more brain power than most people utilise?