I hadn't seen Geoff for about three weeks when I got his voicemail. He and I had worked together for a few years prior to his leaving the company and to say that I missed his wry wit and biting sarcasm on a daily basis would be an understatement. So, when I got his voicemail, telling me that he'd be around the shop for a few days, I called him back and told him we should go to lunch.

A couple of days later, he and I met up at the diner near the shop for lunch. And, in a somewhat strange turn of events for us, the conversation turned to women. Like I said before, Geoff and I had worked together for a few years, but for some reason, the topic of women had never come up. I guess it was because Geoff was scared of them. Well, no, not necessarily scared of them, but the possibility of rejection by them. To which I was flabbergasted. Geoff’s a decent looking kid in his thirties; he drives a nice car and has a better job than I do. He’s pretty neat and a pretty snappy dresser. I didn’t see the problem. The odds of him being rejected by your standard woman seemed a little low to me.

What really amazed me, though, was his fear of being rejected. When I further questioned him on it, he confided to me that what it really boiled down to was his fear of embarrassment. He’s absolutely terrified of being embarrassed. And that makes him not ask girls out and stops him from doing lots of other things. Which, to some extent, I could understand. But I’ve never let that stop me. Hell, if you add up all the stupid shit I’ve done over the last thirty or so years, roughly half my life has been spent in some sort of situation one would consider embarrassing.

Take my virginity. Please. Okay, no bad jokes. But really, I’m not sure how you lost your virginity (feel free to tell me if you like), but I lost mine to a girl I’d been dating on a bathroom floor at a party. What ? Not that bad, you say ? What if I told you that almost immediately after the act was completed, the door to said bathroom burst open and a couple of idiots, armed with ketchup bottles, made the place look like something out of The Shining ? You see, they thought it was my girlfriends first time (it wasn’t) and thought that it’d be funny to have as much blood on the walls as they assumed would be on the bathroom rug. Did I mention that my girlfriend and I were completely nude when the ketchup shower started ? Standing in a starkly lit bathroom that smelled of sex and booze, completely covered in ketchup an covering my rapidly withering erection with both hands and I couldn’t stop grinning like an idiot. Because I’ just gotten laid.

And that’s only fifteen or so minutes of my life. There’s hours of this crap. How about the time I was trying to impress a cheerleader with my leet skateboarding skills ? That’s kind of a long story, but let’s just say I ended up on my back with blood spurting from my nose and I was pretty sure I was paralyzed. What about when I finally got up the nerve to ask Gina Magana out and then proceeded to vomit all over her shoes ? Or the time I got sucker punched outside a bar and ended face first in dog shit. I actually laugh about that one now. You see what I mean. Any other person would be mortified. Terminal embarrassment. But not this kid. Because I really don’t let it stop me. So what if I broke my nose trying to impress a girl ? I eventually got her to like me and we dated for a while. I won the fight with dog shit on my face. And it cleans up pretty good, with a little soap and water, and if you’re too drunk to care that you missed a spot behind your ear. While Gina didn’t speak to me again after I blew chunks on her Chucks, her friend did.

I tried to convey all of this to Geoff and while he seemed a little hesitant at first, he cottoned on to what I was saying pretty quickly. Time will tell if he’s able to suck up his fear and ask a woman out. All I could tell him was that for every woman who says no to him, there’s another woman who will say yes. And sometimes you have to go through quite a few “No’s” before you find the few that’ll say “Yes.” Like I said, time will tell.

So, how about you guys ? What embarrassing things have you lived through ?

thefinn doesn't embarrass easily, but you're welcome to try. Archives

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