Hello. My name is Stephen and I am socially awkward. I am the guy at that party you threw last weekend who stood alone in the corner and pretended to be listening to the music you had playing until someone told me that there was no music playing. I am a sad island of a man.
This is no great revelation. People have been telling me this for years and probably will continue to do so until my eventual death at the hands of a Greek lexicon falling from a sixth story window or I just quit going to parties. Really, I am the only person who is constantly surprised by just how socially awkward I can be. I keep thinking I will change. I keep believing that this will be the weekend I don’t make a fool of myself. But no.
I have not had one conversation at a party this semester where I did not come off as a completely imbalanced lunatic. The highlights include me promising to plan an elaborate conspiracy to ensure that an acquaintance’s adulterous ex-boyfriend is suddenly and inexplicably shot three times in the stomach by a small foreign man with a funny ethnic accent. I then spent the rest of the night walking up to her, making a gun with my fingers, poking her in the stomach and yelling, “Bang! Bang!” At last count, I’ve run at least seven good jokes into the ground. It’s what I do best. I’ve also gotten into innumerable arguments that turned violent, the majority of these with girls who I have at least eight inches and 20 pounds on. I have gotten beaten up every time. But the greatest indignity comes when I get an e-mail the next morning from said girl apologizing for hurting me and saying that she doesn’t know her own strength sometimes.
Sometimes, just for the hell of it, I tell people, “I’m a sexy robot. (A robot who likes sex)”. Well, to be honest, I actually sing it, but it’s one of the few things I ever manage to say at a party that people manage to take well. But then I start doing the sexy robot dance, and it all goes downhill from there. Which of course is another aspect of my social retardation: I can’t dance. Or rather, I can’t dance in any fashion that is acceptable outside the confines of my kitchen. And even then I think I am killing the house plants. Or, at the very least, curdling the milk. I don’t know how to dance provocatively; I don’t even know how to dance unobtrusively. I only know two modes of dance: arrhythmic and like a Croatian youth on Ecstasy during a Europa concert (which is itself just a special kind of arrhythmic dance). I am one of the very few socially awkward dancers out there. While some people simply have two left feet, I just have four elbows. Long, sharp, gangly elbows that tend to hit everyone around me. Lately, I’ve just been telling people I only know how to dance ironically and leaving it at that.
Part of the problem with all of this is that I’m a recluse with enough cans of birch beer stockpiled in my fridge to last me until the end of time or the day when physical plant finally gets around to coming to my apartment and fixing my unsafe-at-any-temperature oven, whichever comes first. I don’t get out much. I’ll admit it. One time I grew a beard just to see what would happen. It looked like pubic hair and eventually my mother made me shave it. These are the kinds of things I do with my spare time. Thus you can imagine how excited I must be when I get a chance to go out and talk to someone other than the bobble-head Mojo Jojo toy I have on my bookcase. When I manage to get out of my room, I’m like a puppy on speed.
And herein lies the other problem with being a quasi-hermit: I don’t know a lot of people. This wouldn’t be a problem, but thanks to this column, people tend to know who I am. Lately, I’ve been adamantly refusing that I’m actually Steve Aubrey and insisting that my name is Scott. The reason is this: I’m not actually that funny in person. At least not intentionally. And let me make this clear. Some of you reading this column may assume that I, Stephen Blake Aubrey, am not actually like this persona in my column. You are dead wrong. This is my life for better or worse. I really am this clumsy, sweaty, awkward and generally disagreeable.
This doesn’t mean I don’t want to be your friend. In fact, I really want to be your friend. Just understand that it’s probably better for everyone if I just spend my Friday night lying fully clothed on a bed in a dark room listening to Loveless.
So, I’ll see you around. I’ll be the guy standing in the corner.
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