Social Butterfly

I'm going to admit something to you, Internet:

I'm more often than not a fairly awkward mess.

I feel as if this is as good a place as any to start a new blog, because while introductory, it also serves as a fairly deft warning. Awkwardness Ahead. Expressing myself can be a battle. Don't get me wrong, I get by. Really! But I often find myself wondering about the rare combination of personality defects that make me both welcoming and off-putting.

On one hand, I have an honest face. And by this I mean that any stranger in any situation thinks that I'm the one guy in the line at Best Buy customer service who needs to hear the intimate details of his private life or his feelings on ObamaCare, oh and hey, while we're here, he should also definitely inform me of that time he hired a stripper to bite his friend. Something like this will happen 85% of the time I make eye contact with someone in public who is not otherwise occupied. Combined with my database of kneejerk polite responses and head motions in the face of uncomfortableness, social situations like these often continue to spiral downward without end in sight.

However, put me in a group setting, somewhere where I'm expected to interact with strangers and not be ambushed by them, and suddenly I'm the weird shy dude. In fact, "shy" is the number one adjective used to describe me by acquaintances who don't know shit about me. I guess I can understand why that happens. In unfamiliar settings, I have a very specific game plan: observation. I'm not one to waste words to begin with, but this is different. It is through steady, almost militant observation of everyone else's interactions that I can usually find one person who I can probably be friends with. Then I get said person alone, lower their defenses with clever traps, and finally I attack!!! Kind of like a friendship velociraptor. People who observe me observing usually have one of two reactions: 1.) they think I'm creepy, or 2.) they think I'm shy. Interestingly enough it's usually the people who recognize that I'm just harmlessly creepy that I end up getting along better with. The shy group is mostly made up of idiots. On the very last day of my high school career, I had a girl come up to me and tell me that everyone thought it was adorable how shy I was and that I was "secretly cool." I think this might have actually been an insult, though I don't think she meant it that way. Mostly it was just a stupid thing to say to someone in general.

In respect to my problems getting out there and meeting people, I have maintained a small but very tight knit group of five friends. The amount of time I have known these five people are 5 years, 10 years (maybe 12, this is debatable), 11 years, 12 years, and 20 years. So I kind of play to keep in that regard. I also have like four other friends who live scattered around the country that I rarely get to see and, for purposes of this particular post, do not really count.

You see, lately I've been doing my best to be open to making more friends. My group gets together every Sunday to play games at the same coffee shop we have been going to for years because we fear change, but the others in my group, in very non-change-fearing ways, have been inviting new people. Getting along with them has surprisingly not been an issue because at Scrabble nights, I'm in my element. But it's got me thinking - maybe I should be bringing around new people. But who should it be? And how should I go about it?

There's the cute guy at work who I've kind of been friendship velociraptoring, but I'm having a hard time figuring out if he finds me charming or terrifying. Never a good start. And recently I found out he might have a fiance, so every time we're really having strong conversation and we start making plans, I awkwardly tack on a tense "andyourgirlfriendistotallyinvited." We have yet to recover from that once. Or there's the kid who I hit on while we were both studying one night at the coffee shop but who turned out be a high school junior, and who actually came to one game night, causing a lot of pedophilia snarkiness because I'm apparently the only person in the world who thinks he doesn't look like a high school junior.

My one recent success was I admit kind of cheating at the game. The first time I met my boyfriend's coworker Michael I knew it was meant to be. We were playing a game called the Game of Things, where you try to guess who gave what answer to a particular question. I was able to correctly identify Michael 100% of the time because he always gave the answer I found funniest. The velociraptor had awakened. Thusly, through some effort and several months, I have requisitioned him from the boyfriend, and he and I are now gym buddies. And also after-gym-Wendy's buddies. My first semi-solo success in honestly years. It feels good, Internet. And hopefully it's the kind of semi-success story I can awkwardly start bringing to this new blog on a semi-regular basis.

I can dream.