#4 "Awkwardness" -- Don

“Man is the only animal that blushes – or needs to.” – Mark Twain

If there were a support group for clumsy people, I’d consider joining it, but I would also spend every meeting worrying about who’s going to mash into my car in the parking lot as everyone left to go home.  The word “awkward” comes from an older English word “awke” meaning “turned the wrong way.”  I think the word “awkward” is itself awkward because even when I know I’ve spelled it correctly, it still looks wrong to me; perhaps it’s the strangeness of those two W’s separated by that single K.  The second W in the word sounds nothing like the first W, and I think the letter K lives in a state of perpetual embarrassment over this.

If only my own sense of perpetual embarrassment were as easy to explain as the letter K’s, then perhaps I’d have a clue as to the best way of coping with this dis-ease, but, alas, when you’re stuck sliding on the Giant Cosmic Banana Peel of Life, you don’t expect to nail the landing like a Russian gymnast. I suspect that most people feel at least a tinge of self-consciousness as they go about their daily routines, but I’m one of those people who would be utterly satisfied if I could just sustain the athleticism of a Weeble, who (as people of my generation know) “wobble, but they don’t fall down.” 

I’d like to imagine that for every person who is as über-uncoordinated as I am that there are other people out there somewhere who are so graceful and lithe that they could roller-skate while shopping for crystal stemware.   Lest readers think I’m exaggerating how klutzy I can be, I once broke a toe simply by walking down a flight of stairs in my own home.  You know that guy who opens up a kitchen cabinet and then reaches for something off the floor and bangs his skull on the cabinet door on his way back up?  Yeah, that guy is me.  Perhaps you’ll remember me better as the kid who was not merely the last person standing against the wall when teams were being picked for junior high phys-ed, but more often than not, the kid who was told by the members of the last team to go, “Look, we really don’t want you playing on our team.”  Although that was a long, long time ago, I can still remember thinking, “Well, at least we’re in agreement about that; I don’t want me playing on your team either.”

If there’s a lesson to be learned from dealing with a lifetime of being supremely uncoordinated, it’s probably this: go ahead and dance at weddings no matter how appalled and horrified the relatives may be at your exuberate ungainliness.  Go ahead and show them your best stuff even if your dance moves look as though they were choreographed by an epileptic.  The kinfolk will get over it.

Here’s the deal: our dignity ultimately comes more from the grace we demonstrate after we’ve fallen on our face than from our ability to avoid the fall in the first place. It doesn’t matter who you are, from time to time Fate is going to shove a pie in your face.  Sometimes you see the meringue coming at you, and other times, bam, out of the blue, you find yourself suddenly looking out at the world through a whipped-cream facial.  It is in those moments when we reveal our true character, and I have found that the best way to respond to these situations is to laugh along with everyone else. 

Once in an English class in front of an entire room of high school freshmen, I sat down on a wooden stool that instantly collapsed beneath me and sent me hurling to the floor.  The guffaws that exploded in the room were loud and authentic.  Now a less experienced teacher would have probably tried to regain control of the classroom by immediately resorting to that authoritarian tone of voice and commanding the students to get over it.  Trust me, that would never work.  The better tactic in a situation such as this is to laugh along with it by stepping outside of your ego for a moment and honestly asking yourself, “Well, wouldn’t you have laughed if you were a high school freshmen and you just saw your English teacher catapult to the floor?”  Ultimately, life offers too few opportunities for genuine laughs, and if you can laugh at yourself when gravity gets the better of you, you stand a much better chance of gaining the respect of others when you get back on your feet again. 

Here, I think, is an absolutely essential distinction we must make as we receive those random bumps and knocks that come at us as we navigate our way through The Funhouse We Call Life:  Just because people may be laughing at something that has happened to us does not mean we are necessarily being ridiculed by them.  Ridicule is mean-spirited and personal, and I have little tolerance for it (I don’t like it whenever someone intentionally tries to hurt my feelings, and I don’t put up with it whenever I think some bully is trying to harass another student in my classroom).   On the other hand, not everything that happens in life comes as a result of deliberate mockery or derision, and when we can learn to respond to what happens to us with a chuckle rather than a profanity, then we really are well on our way to becoming commanders of our own destinies.  If I were The Buddha, I think I would have told people, “Life can be pure joy only after you learn to get used to being kicked in the rump every fifteen minutes.”  I guess that’s why I’m not The Buddha.

Although everyone in my immediate family can tell you their own personal favorite “Don Hits The Ground Thunderously Hard” story (including the time I knocked myself out while testing a zip-line I constructed over the family’s pond and the time I landed on a pile of scrap metal while trying to swing across a ravine), I’ll end this blog post with a brief retelling of the time I mangled the muscles in my left leg by falling 12 feet straight down into a garbage pit. 

About once I year, I make a “get-rid-of-it” run to the dump where I throw out all the useless junk that accumulates in the basement or the barn because it is too big to put out with the rest of the regular weekly garbage.  On this particular trip, I was standing on the tailgate of my dad’s old Ford pickup truck kicking out the last bits of trash into the deep metal receptacle below.   At the Meigs County Refuge Transfer Station, you can park directly above the gigantic metal bins that get loaded onto the back of semis, and from this vantage point, it’s quite easy to just drop whatever you’re wanting to get rid of down into these bins below.  I’m not sure how it happened, but somehow the tailgate I was standing on decided it too belonged in the bottom of the garbage pit, and as it launched itself in a suicidal declaration of its independence from the rest of the truck, I went along for the ride.  I must have looked like a bizarre hillbilly surfer as I whizzed through the air and collided at the bottom with all manner of foul and pointy refuse.  I destroyed the Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) in my knee and subsequently had to endure weeks of crutches and physical therapy, but at least I didn’t pass out this time.

As I looked up from my terminus amidst the debris at the bottom of the massive trash receptacle, I noticed two professional garbage men waiting their turn to jettison their truckloads into the bin I now occupied.  As they looked down at me from where they stood beside my dad’s old Ford pickup, I heard one say to the other, “Now that’s a rookie mistake.”

Okay, even with stars swirling around my eyes and despite being half-buried in crap, I had to laugh.

Olivia says:


I know you think you take awkward to the next level, but I disagree.


To me, you transcend awkwardness.  


What you do is art.  Even when I have watched a handful of those stunts first hand, I can still remember thinking "Wow ... he nails the landing!"  You may slip on every banana peel, but you make it look like you meant to do that.   Well, most of the time at least.  


My favorite and most cherished moment of awkwardness that bloomed into spectacular moment of embarrassment would definitely have to be a family dinner at Bob Evans, circa 2001.  


You know the one.  


Ellie was 9 and I was 11; we shared a booth-seat facing you and Mom.  When the waitress brought us our drinks, you grabbed a straw and prepared it as a blow-dart missel, as that is the instinct of most adolescents and men of all ages.  We ducked, menu-blocked, and otherwise squirmed while you choose your victim.  However, as fate would have it, a fake-out shot at Ellie and a gust from an opened door led your strawpaper up and above your 9-year-old target, to fall lightly, feather-like, on the short white curls of an old lady dining with her husband in the next booth.


"Olivia - go get that!" you say in stage whisper.  We both knew there is no force on earth that would persuade me to pluck that strawpaper from it's newfound nest.  


"Ellie!" You urge Ellie, who has not forgotten that she was the intended target to begin with, and who fanatically declines.  


Never had we ever encountered anything like this.  This conundrum is what I call the "awkward" portion of the experience.  


And worse, her husband had spotted it and was grinning like it was his birthday.  


"Embarrassing" is what describes the next part, when after realizing that you could not convince either of your children to retrieve it, you would have to go where no man had gone before.  


I genuinely have no idea what you said to that woman.  My mind wants it fill it with Yosemite Sam sputtering.  I just know that woman was not pleased to discover her probably salon-did hair was hosting an intruder.  


As you sat back down, I remember trying to pay vivid attention to how we would recover from that moment.  I probably looked over-dramatically with my mouth agape from face to face, as if to search out a cue for what was meant to be said next.  I think we probably just waited in silence punctuated by throat-clearing until the waitress came ten minutes later.   Talk about the longest ten minutes of age 11.  


Thanks for that, Dad.  Truly.   (And you wonder where I developed this taste for awkward moments?)


Yes father, indeed you have definitely earned some sort of minor record in the human triathlon of humiliation.   I can't even tell you how strangely nervous I felt while watching you jump on the trampoline when I was a child.  But what is truly incredible is you that always have the grit to make it to the next round in roughly one piece, if not the same shape.  And for that, you're incredible.  


Also, is that a shirt with a sweatshirt over it in the picture ...?  


Honestly though, I've loved that picture.  That picture is the definition of 'cowabunga'.  

#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.

#3 Sequels and Remakes - Olivia

In the event that I was ever kidnapped, bound, taken to an abandoned movie theater, and forced to watch either a sequel or a remake ... I would have take a moment to choose.

I would probably bite my lip.

"Time ees teeking, meesy. Choose or ve vill choose for you," say my Russian captors.  I'm guessing that they're Russian from their accent, but I suppose we could also assume they're Norwegian.

"I don't sink you vould vant dat." They laugh heartily to each other.

I look from captor to captor, and then to the blank screen and then down to my wrists, duct-taped to the arms of the theater chair.

"Remake," I say clearly, without even a flicker of fear.

I can sense some of you shaking your heads, wringing your hands.  You're nervous.  You're secretly repeating "Sequel! Sequel!", thinking back on all the bad remakes you've ever watched.  You're not sure what these men are capable of ...

I stand by remake.  I'm not scared.  This is what I'm thinking:

A remake really has nothing to lose.  If the original film was terrible to begin with, then it can only be get better.  Or remain terrible.

And if the film is awesome, one should expect nothing but straight up A-game.  By trying to redo something that probably doesn't need to be redone, I should be so impressed that I perpetually make new friends just to see the movie repeatedly.  I mean, the film better come with seat-belts.

If it doesn't meet those expectations, I can shrug my shoulders and smile fondly on the original.

But the sequel is different.  I think it's far riskier to sequel than to do a remake of even a good film.

I will always be suspicious of the sequel.

A sequel can be like the generic brand version of something I would normally spend a little more on.
A sequel can be like the unnecessary cousin in an already packed car.
A sequel can be like the extra seasonings in a soup that was delicious before you gambled on it needing something.
A sequel can be like the nice man you met online who was cool at first on your first date, but was bumming cash from you by the second date.
A sequel can be like those long minutes you will never get back between being deposited in the room where you sit on paper and actually seeing the doctor.

Sequels make me nervous because it's obviously additional.  Adding a person here, throwing out a conflict there, can feel like tampering, especially if I liked the original story.  Especially if the addition is not necessary.  Especially if it's poorly done.

Frankly, there is a fine line between telling a longer story and milking something for all it's worth.

The soundest choice (although not fool-proof) is setting parameters ahead of time.  Trilogies, especially if spread out carefully enough, serve their purpose well.  Or filming a book series, where the audience knows what to expect, often is successful.  Those are safe choices.

But by making another movie, the story often becomes more vulnerable.

And if you do lose the integrity of the story, you've killed your cash cow.  We all know if it weren't for the poor choices in the third portions of Pirates of the Caribbean, or Spiderman, they probably could've kept making those films forever.

I don't mind spending time or money in the name of entertainment, as long as I'm not being suckered into into sloppy excessive storytelling.  Puh-lease.

"Zees ees an interestink choice you make," says my captor with a sinister chuckle.  "Deed you hear her? She said remake.  Vell, ve will give her remake ..."

The lights dim.  From the darkness I hear one of them shout, "Put een ze Pink Panther!  Zee von veeth Steve Martin!"

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"

Don Responds --


It's too bad that you know Steve Martin from later in his career because the first few films he made right after he quit being a standup comedian were awesome.  If you ever get a chance to see any of his early films including The Jerk, The Man With Two Brains, or Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, you'd understand why he is still revered in Hollywood today.


As to your overall essay, I'm pretty much in agreement: I think remake offer more in terms of artistic vision than sequels do.  With that said, however, I also think there are lots of TV and film roles that are so iconic that they should never have been remade; two examples of this would be The Beverly Hillbillies and The A-Team.  A lot of times when I see what sequels or remakes are coming soon, I think what a shame it is that so many original scripts go unmade because someone wants to redo something that should just be left alone.  When I go out to the movies, I want to be transported to some place I've never been before; remakes and sequels make it just that much more difficult to discover something fresh and original.

#3 "Sequels and Remakes" -- Don

It’s funny how some memories decide to stick to the back of your brain like gum on the soles of your shoes and other memories fade quicker than chalk on a sidewalk.  Although I’ve only been out to the movies three or four times this year, I’d be hard pressed to remember which ones they were (okay, I definitely remember seeing Avatar; that was this year, right? And a 3-D cartoon, How to Train Your Dragon, but the other one or two, I’d really have to work at trying to remember what they were).

Now this may sound weird, but when I started to reflect on the topic of “Sequels and Remakes,” my imagination shot me with a recollection so vivid that it might as well have been yesterday:  I’m a sophomore in high school and I’m sitting in a movie theater in December of 1976.  I’m hanging out with a couple of my buddies, and we’re waiting to see, The Pink Panther Strikes Again starring Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau.  Now for people Olivia’s age, you should know, that in 1976, Peter Sellers pretty much represented the absolute zenith of film comedy.  Although Monty Python had released The Holy Grail the year before, none of us, at that time, had ever heard of it because it only became hugely popular in subsequent years as a cult film that we watched repeatedly at midnight showings throughout my college years, and furthermore, the utter revolution to film comedy that was to be Airplane! wouldn’t be released until the summer of 1980, nearly four years later.

Okay, so I’m sitting in the movie theater, the lights go down, and just as The Preview of Coming Attractions are getting ready to roll, I hear for the first time, some blaring trumpets playing what is now immediately recognizable as the introductory notes of the theme to Star Wars.  “Dah Dah Dah Dah Dah, Dah Dah Dah Dah Dah!”  A somber voiceover remarks as a blur of action-packed clips begin to whirl past our eyeballs, “In a galaxy, far far away.”  Wow! My brain is in immediate overload.  Spaceships, laser swords, aliens, robots, and some evil dude dressed entirely in black who looked as though he had traded his entire face for the front of a Buick!  It was almost too cool for words.   As the trailer ended, the screen faded to the message “Coming Summer 1977” and for a moment, the theater grew deadly silent as though the entire crowd had sucked in their breath and forgot how to exhale.  At that moment, before the next trailer began to roll, I heard someone sitting behind me say, “Next summer?  What the heck?  I bet they haven’t even made it yet.”

Well, they made it all right, and as they like to say in Hollywood (or so I’ve been told) “And the rest is history.”  Stars Wars, as far I’m concerned, represents both everything that can go right in a film’s sequel and also everything that can go wrong.   When its first sequel The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980, I don’t know if the American public would have been more excited if real freakin’ aliens had decided to land on the White House lawn.  The first sequel did everything a great sequel is supposed to do:  it started to answer the questions we had about the conflict and the characters from the first film, it introduced us to Yoda (who -- being a Jedi muppet who could lift spaceships with his mind -- took cool to a whole new level) and it kept us on the edge of our seat with special effects and sets that contributed to (rather than swallowed up) the narrative.  I guess you probably would have had to been there to understand just how mind-blowing it was to hear Darth Vader tell Luke that he was his father and to see him chop his son’s arm off with a light saber.

By the end of the third film, Return of the Jedi, however, I’d basically had enough.   If forced to say why (and what kind of subliminal pun is that), I guess I’d have to say it was the Ewoks that ruined it for me (for those of you who don’t remember, the Ewoks were, you know, basically aboriginal Teddy Bears).  The problem with the Ewoks is they weren’t just cute, they were too cute, and nothing can ruin good Science Fiction like the odor of too cute.  Years later when the next installments finally came out, I ended up, of course, handing over my ticket money for these three other sequels (excuse me, prequels), but I ended up going to these movies almost as though I had an obligation to go.  At first, I had high hopes for The Phantom Menace, but because of Jar-Jar, this movie ended up smelling even cuter than ROTJ (and look,  here’s Darth Vader as a little kid, isn’t he adorable?)  I mean really, let’s take the most notorious villain in movie history and turn him into a Little Rascal.  Blaggh.

Okay, before I run out of room here, here are my rules of thumb when it comes to sequels and remakes:

1) Sequels and remakes shouldn’t make us feel like we’re being exploited for merely liking the original so much.  I completely understand that the point of making movies is to make money for the people who are producing the films, but I don’t want to be reminded of that while I’m watching the movie or the deal’s off.    I know I’m watching a bad sequel when in the midst of the movie, I’m trying to spot the toys, video game, or other merchandise that’s going to be shoved down our throats whenever we visit Walmart for the next few weeks.  A bad sequel or remake crosses the line of the audience’s willful suspension of disbelief and makes us feel stupid for going along with it.

2) I have little tolerance for sequels that basically have nothing but a tenuous connection to the original, or feature few (if any) characters from the first movie.  Carrie died dramatically at the end of that first movie ever inspired by a Stephen King novel, so what the heck was up with Carrie II (oh, a previously unheard of half-sister who basically goes through the same story years later.  Well, that’s just lame.)  When the Sting II came out in 1983, Jackie Gleason and Mac Davis took over the roles of Paul Newman and Robert Redford.   Really, they bore such striking resemblances, I'm sure no else even noticed.  Now you could argue that Gleason and Davis were playing similar, but different characters who just happened to share the same last names, but considering the point of the story of the sequel was the villain from the first film was trying to get his revenge in the second, that doesn’t make any sense either.

3) Any movie with “Final” in its title should have to offer a refund to viewers of the first film before being allowed to make a sequel.  Before being allowed to buy a ticket to a sequel in which the death of the main character was an essential part of the original film, potential moviegoers should have to pass an intelligence test.  Why the heck, by the way, did The Never-ending Story need a sequel?  That just boggles my mind.

4) Even though I’m a staunch believer in Freedom of Speech, if I had the power, I’d still pass a law restricting sequels with numbers in their titles from being allowed to be remade.  There are two Halloween II’s, and another Halloween III is supposed to come out next year. Now even through there are already more than a dozen Halloween films, how in the heck is this supposed to be Halloween III when the original Halloween III came out in 1982 (and even it had nothing to do with continuing the story of the first two Halloween movies).

5) Finally, a good remake or sequel must (if nothing else) create its own aesthetic that demonstrates a fresh outlook on the old material.  Take the recent Batman movies for example, what made Batman Begins and The Dark Knight so terrific was the artistic vision of their director, Christopher Nolan.  What made Batman such a great film in 1989 was the artistic vision of Director Tim Burton.  If a film is nothing more than a mere imitation of the original, then what’s the point?  I’d just as soon watch the original.

My favorite sequel?  It’s probably a tie between The Road Warrior (a sequel to Mad Max) and The Godfather Part II (which, by the way, was in 1974 the first sequel to use a number in its title).  Go figure.

Olivia says:


You know, I really don't think my generation has a Star Wars moment.  


Wait - maybe.  I think the closest we've got is Lord of the Rings.  


I remember sitting in the theater somewhere in the Cleveland suburbs.  I was riveted to every finite detail of the first film - they're in mid-mele, Frodo and the ring in jeopardy -  when the projector stops.  It slows and flickers into black.  And the theater is in absolute uproar for almost a whole minute.  Drinks were thrown!  It was absolute pandemonium!   


Yeah, that doesn't even touch the wonder of Star Wars.


After much reflection I've decided that my favorite sequel is probably Ghostbusters 2.   And I'm not settled on a favorite remake, but I do really appreciate Oceans 11.