Some days I get really bored of meditating upon new things
to which my body odor can be likened (today’s simile: a stale fortune cookie)
and going for long sobbing sessions drives. Because these things are, of
course, how one occupies one’s time (in addition to a never-ending stream of
pointless job applications) when one is unemployed.
 |
In an effort to get me out of the house and, more
importantly, out of the dirty pajamas I call my mope rags, my mother suggested
signing up for a class. Her reasoning is that any normal person would make
friends. And she’s right, but unfortunately I’m not a normal person. I would say
that I’ve forgotten how to make friends and socialize, but that would
imply that I knew how at one point.
See, I’ve signed up for this theology class a local church.
Before our lecture and discussion, we are expected to have dinner with each
other in the parish hall, a dinner which, if you know anything about me, is
complete agony. I honestly cannot remember how I have ever managed to make
friends, and indeed sitting through these weekly dinners that are like a
Greatest Hits album of my gaffes has made me seriously wonder whether the
people I think are my friends are, in fact, imaginary.
I wish I knew how to show these people how desperately I’d
love for them to tell me about their day, using a method that does not involve
asking accidentally personal questions about their work in a voice several
octaves higher than my actual speaking voice. I try to fill our many awkward
silences with a friendly smile to show how open I am, but instead I smile the
near-hysterical forced smile of someone who has just farted in polite company
and is hoping to God that no one heard it. When conversation has been paired
away from me, I drink obscene amounts of water simply so I have something to do
with my hands. Other times I give up and pick a spot on the wall, stare at it
with a forced serene expression on my face, and wonder why this is supposed to
be better than sitting at home in my underpants and crying.
The worst is when one of the priests comes to the table,
because they use a Scream movie entrance rather than a Jaws approach. That is
to say, none of them wear clerical gear, so you don’t notice them slowly but
surely making their way towards your table, which would allow you to prepare
for their arrival. Instead you casually
look to your left, jump about five feet in the air, let slip an expletive, and
say hello to the priest that was definitely not sitting next to you just a
second ago. But why would you need warning for a priest anyway?
Well, only a minute before you were treading water in a sea
of people with actual social skills, and then all of the sudden without warning
the priest, who as a priest is naturally the only other person in the room
whose social ineptitude can even begin to compare to yours, comes up and starts
talking to you. There is at least some hope of normalcy when I talk with the
other people, but now suddenly the conversation becomes the verbal equivalent
of two fat people trying to come through a doorway at the same time.
If dinner isn’t alienating enough, the post-lecture
discussion does a great job of making me feel more foreign than I’ve ever felt
in my life. I’m not entirely sure which country I think I’m from, but I think
we can safely assume no one has heard of it. It’s not just my social
awkwardness, it’s also the content: they talk about heaven as social justice
and replace God with a vague “higher power,” apparently everyone’s been
canonized, and we listen to the Gospel according to Maya Angelou. It’s all so
foreign to me that I would have an easier time if they instead talked about
Malian butt hygiene.
I could have given up socially, but I’m stubborn. Pioneer
spirit, American can-do attitude and all that. I like to think of myself as a
one-woman Titanic band, if the Titanic band had sobbed hysterically while
nonetheless sticking to their guns by going down with the ship. And so what
does the one-woman Titanic band do?
She signs up to serve at the parish brunch. I figured I
would have a purpose, and I could make small talk but would also not be weird
for being quiet. And, best of all, I’d have something to do with my hands. THIS
would be my social in, I declared.
When I walked in to serve brunch and discovered my role for
the morning, I am convinced that Satan and Hitler were sitting on a couch
somewhere in Hell, having a fantastic laugh about it. Hitler actually laughed
so hard that he snorted, got really embarrassed, and had to tell Satan to stop
making fun of him. See, I had been placed in the position of “kitchen runner.”
That is, I had to stand awkwardly (well, the awkwardly part was optional, but I
like to go big in all my roles) to the side and watch other people serve other
people. Should any buffet server run out of food—which, I must stress, did not
happen—I was to go to the kitchen to bring more out. But mostly I was to just
stand awkwardly to the side.
Have you ever noticed that when you’re uncomfortable and
have nothing to do with your hands you suddenly turn into an octopus? It’s like
all of you is just a blob of hands, knocking into things, touching your face,
shaking violently. It seemed like every time I tried to casually ignore one of
my hands it would suddenly become five hands, and if any of those new hands
were ignored they would then turn into even more hands. Hands everywhere, but
what do I do with them?
 |
| This pretty much sums it up. |
I tried standing by the silverware station with my hands in
my apron pockets, but there were two problems. The apron pockets were in a quasi-vulgar
place, and also a parishioner thanked me for my work. Having done literally
nothing to enable the fine buffet spread besides putting on an apron, this was
more than I could bear. I figured I could reject the gratitude and explain that
everyone else had done the work, but it seemed like I would waste too much of
her time in explaining that this was not false modesty but simple accuracy. After
all, she just wanted to say a quick thanks before shuffling away to eat her
breakfast—she wasn’t asking for insight into my social anxiety. So instead I
died a little inside and said, “You’re welcome. Enjoy!”
I figured I could just do this to anyone who said thank you,
but my hopes were dashed against the rocks when I met the eyes of the 8 year
old standing between me and her mom, who (lucky bitch) was assigned to serve the
scrambled eggs. I swear this 8 year old girl in a sunflower-patterned sundress
could see into my soul as her eyes seemed to sentence me to Hell with a, “YOU
DID NOT DESERVE THAT THANK YOU!” For all I know she didn’t even hear the thank
you exchange and was just appalled by how ugly I am, but I didn’t want to take
any chances.
Absolutely terrified of what this 8 year old girl with
flowers in her hair would do to me, I swapped my creepy lurking by the
silverware table for falsely purposeful surveying. I floated around the parish
hall, pretending to do mental calculations of how much orange juice we had left
(enough), patrolling around like a soldier visually verifying that every table
had a pitcher of water (they did), and, perhaps most stupidly, putting on an
official census worker-like air to ask the buffet servers if they needed
anything (they didn’t).
Still though, I wasn’t as bad as the Brunch Nazi. She was in
charge of ensuring the smooth running of the parish brunch, and she clearly
thought the day was the culmination of her life’s work and existence. Indeed,
she was called by God to manage THIS particular brunch, which I guess to her
turns every scone we are short of into one concrete slab in the sidewalk to
Hell. Someone served an old lady about 30 seconds before Parish Brunch Go Time,
and Brunch Nazi reacted as though someone intentionally shat in her jacuzzi.
She also used the word “need” more often than I use the word
“just.” Just about every sentence took the form of “I need you to do X” or “We
need to do Y” or “You need Z.” And you could tell that she really meant the
NEED, you could hear the urgent desperation in her voice every time she opened
her mouth. The “need” seemed to suggest a WE WILL DIE IF THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN. I
found this amusing because, actually, we don’t need to do any of this. We could
actually just say screw it to all of this and go back to bed. But instead we
got “I NEED Hallie to serve this much potatoes. I NEED you to go to the kitchen
to ask them about this. We NEED , We NEED, We NEED, You NEED, I NEED.”
Lady, you know what I need? I NEED you to calm the eff down. You’re like
my dog when the mailman comes, and you
know what we give to my dog? Prozac. You should look into it. Because you know
what happens when the parish brunch is running a little short on scrambled
eggs?
Everyone dies.
Oh wait, no, that’s what happens when there’s a nuclear
holocaust. Sorry, I meant to say that some people don’t get scrambled eggs. And
if having to suffer through scones, potatoes, ham, and unlimited coffee and
juice without scrambled eggs at the parish brunch is enough to make someone
abandon Christianity and join some kind of pagan cult, then so be it. They’re
probably better off there than here anyway.
