#4 Awkwardness - Olivia

To begin, two haikus because I think haikus are an awkward poetry form.

Embarrassment is
when you find your shirt matches
the gay French teacher's.

But awkwardness is
hours later, both stuck in
the elevator.

Finally, a topic I can speak on with some authority!

As one who left her teenage years somewhat recently, years that make for a hotbed for gut-curdling awkwardness, I feel like I should know. Also, have you met me?

In case you haven't ... Hello, my name is Olivia. I thrive on awkward moments.

True awkwardness requires finesse. That's what separates 'awkward' from 'embarrassing'.

Embarrassment lumbers in dressed ridiculously, comes on too strong when hitting on your spouse, and slips on a banana peel on the way out. It's why I'm pretty sure people watched America's Funniest Home Videos for so long. Good old fashioned light-hearted schadenfreude.

Awkwardness, while related, is not this. It's the internal groan.

Many would say awkwardness is less funny. Awkwardness, like embarrassment, requires a dance partner, but lacks the certainty in mutual experience that embarrassment can claim. Laughter, the antidote to most embarrassment, may not fix your awkward situation, and in fact, may make it worse. As the pressure increases, you grope to say something, only to notice your foot already in your mouth. This is fight or flight turned up to eleven. We won't even mention the sweat-stains.

The discomfort experienced in either awkwardness or embarrassment may vary, but you can at least talk about it when you're embarrassed. Saying "This is awkward" only makes it so.

That's what gives awkwardness its potency. It's the doubt.

And if used correctly, awkwardness could be a key ingredient in gourmet living.

You read me right: Gourmet Living.

You see, experience has taught me that in actuality, awkwardness is just tension in its simplest form. It's a weak point. And it's an opportunity.

Much of my generation has developed an apetite for awkwardness. We love shows like Parks and Recreation, and partially why we like reality TV.  Between the moments of over the top drama are the limbo moments, and nine times out of ten, it's going to be awkward.

Often, we feel awkwardness not because things didn't go as we had planned, but because things went the opposite of what we had planned. This happens more and more because we rely on more technological forms of communication. And yet, the more we do, the harder talking to people in line at the grocery store becomes.

So, why do we like it? For me, it's appreciating the irony. It's scooping up the power of the situation. And though some may doubt it, there is definitely something funny about it. Awkward moments can make for pretty great stories too.

But some of you would like to shake off awkwardness like spiders, I know. If you're stuck, you can always, as a last ditch effort, try saying "Wow, that's embarrassing." It changes the game and suddenly, it is.   Hey, at least they don't assume you think it's awkward.

If that doesn't work for you, Hyperbole and a Half has these solutions to offer.

But anyway, as I always tell my sister, "When things get awkward, just do as Jim does on The Office. Just look into the camera."


Don Replies:


I think you're on to something here; if I'm reading you correctly, embarrassment is something someone can feel without necessarily others catching on to it (or at least not yet) such as if you show up to a meeting and everyone has their required binder with all the notes it and you suddenly realize you left your copy at home (that sort of thing).  Embarrassment is felt when you become aware that soon (if not immediately) you're going to become the center of attention due to something you've said or done and you've got a heightened sense of it -- like a premonition of your own personal train wreck about to happen.  Awkwardness, then, while not as pungent as embarrassment is when two or more people are basically aware of the ickiness between them at the same time; in other words, both of their spider-senses are tingling (or twitching or however your spider sense goes off when you know and that other person knows somebody is either figuratively or literally stinking up the place).


Your post makes me want another word, a new word, that's a bit of a hybrid between embarrassment and awkwardness -- only instead of someone being aware of their own Spotlight of Shame (like embarrassment) or being caught under the Umbrella of Anxiety with someone else (like awkwardness), this new term would refer exclusively to when you are embarrassed for someone else who should be embarrassed by what he or she is doing but is otherwise oblivious to the discomfort he or she is radiating to the other folks in her vicinity. Olivia and I share a relative who is the master of this (I won't mention any names but it rhymes with "bandfather".)  Once we were having a meal in a nice restaurant and this relative stopped a stranger who was passing by to ask if she used to go to his church.  When this person (rather foolishly in my opinion) replied, "I think so, I may have gone to your church" (and perhaps she was simply trying to be polite to this elderly fellow with a genuine hope of moving on a quickly as possible), this relative responded loudly, "Well, what's the matter? You can't get out of bed on Sundays anymore?"  Of course at that point the rest of family and I sitting at the table wanted to be swallowed up by the floor and deposited into a deep crevice within the Earth's core, but the relative who made the rest of us cringe with such frantic distress went contentedly back to munching on his salad as though nothing had happened.  And, of course, as far as he was aware, nothing had happened.  Anyway, I want a new word for that because, seriously, that happens a lot in our family. . . I mean a lot.