Day 25 – Part Deux – The Birthplace of Awkward

Most people are not natural storytellers. I have one friend who is the most gifted person I know when it comes to telling stories. To watch him do his thing is truly inspiring. It’s unfortunate more people are not better at this. Lots of people have interesting things that happen to them but they are unable to convey the wonder / mystery / hilarity / gravity of what has transpired. I think things are easier when one is writing the story versus telling it orally. When you are writing you can review what you’re going to say and ensure that all the essential points are present. You can also easily remove the unimportant bits.

I remember the time I laughed the most in my entire life. Like it was yesterday. It’s strange because at the time I was laughing so hard I thought I was going have to go to the hospital, yet when I tell the story I know that it is impossible to accurately impart the absurdity of what happened. And to be honest, the story is way funnier from Tim’s point of view because I had at least spoken with Spencer the previous class. Tim had no idea who the hell this guy was.

And then there was that moment of silence right after Spencer said it.

The words he spoke, in isolation, are nothing special: bummer, last night, of, busload, Mickey Rourke, movie – to name a few. If he’d been sitting across from us in the university cafeteria the impact wouldn’t have been as great. Humans are naturally social creatures and I think he just wanted to share something that had interested / surprised him from the previous day.

Either way, confusion turned to disbelief then back to confusion and then it became understanding. And then the laughing started. And we couldn’t stop. I think the reason we laughed so much was because we were in class and it we couldn’t laugh out loud so we had to internalize it. The fact that Tim looked like he was about to explode made me laugh even harder.

And looking back I feel bad for Spencer. He knew we were laughing – he was sitting right in front of us. But we were not laughing at him, just something absurd he said. And I’m sure right after he said it, he probably realized that he’d just said the mother of all non-sequiturs. The very first “awkward”, if you will. Remember, this was way back on November 15, 1994.