May 8, 2008

Awkward?

Here's some random KG trivia for you: I spent a year of my life attending school and living at St. Edward's University in Austin.
It was a nice school: beautiful campus, relatively small classes, wonderful professors (mostly...), and friendly students. Coming from a small private high school, the atmosphere of such a small school was not a great leap out of my comfort zone. After just a few weeks I recognized pretty much everyone on campus. Every day I'd see them in the cafeteria or the coffee shop (meal card=thousands of raspberry Italian Sodas consumed constantly by Yours Truly) or in the hallways or walking between buildings or smoking much less that 15 feet away from any entrance.
It wasn't hard to find a niche at St. Ed's. There were student organizations begging for your attendance, chalked on every sidewalk and painted on butcher paper tacked to the walls. It was an easy choice for me: Fellowship of Christian Athletes.
No, I wasn't an athlete.
Yes, my future husband, DG, was an athlete and held some powerful rank in the organization.
Granted, about 8 people attended the meetings and events, but that doesn't change the fact that he was president or something like that.

Stay with me, there is a point to this seemingly mindless rambling.

I quickly made friends through my "boyfriend" connection and soon spent most of my time hanging out with soccer players, baseball players, softball players, volleyball players, basketball players, and Rachel. Rachel was, like me, a non-athlete, but found herself drawn to FCA as it was the only not-exclusively Catholic Christian student organization. We had a lot of good times together...but we'll talk about Rachel later.

One day I was sitting in St. Ed's wonderful cafeteria (I LOVED that place! Two words: Freshman Fifteen) with a few of my athlete friends. Things were pretty dead, so it must have been a late Friday afternoon or something. We were just hanging around, eating yogurt pretzels and Sour Patch Kids, shootin' the breeze, having a grand ol' time.
Behind me I could hear a young man speaking jovially into his cell phone. I didn't recognize the voice at all, so I felt no need to turn and look at this person or pay them any attention.
The voice started getting closer and closer, but my friends and I kept chatting away. My friends may have glanced over my head one or two times at this person on the phone, but not in any way that made me feel I needed to turn around.
The chatting voice continued to close in, and he was so close that our conversation died down and my friends started looking curiously at the young man that I could feel standing behind my chair. I was about to turn my head when I felt a firm hand on the back of my neck.
I tensed slightly and looked, wide-eyed at my friends. Suddenly the unfamiliar man-hand started massaging my neck and running its fingers through my hair, then down around my shoulders and upper back. My friends started to look a little disturbed and slightly offended by this man (who they knew was not the love of my life, DG) touching me so personally and familiarly. I turned red and my shoulders tensed up around my ears. I leaned forward desperately, trying to escape his touch.
Meanwhile, the young man brought his jolly conversation to a close, snapped his phone shut, and turned to face me.

I can't quite describe the color the flesh on his face turned at that moment. It was more like a loss of color. And for a moment, I thought he was going to cry.
Then the color suddenly rushed back to his head and he turned a shade of scarlet that could almost be described as purple.
"I, uh..., I,I..." he stuttered.
My friends and I raised our eye brows (and I continued to blush my hiney off), waiting for some sort of explanation.
"SorryIthoughtyouweresomeoneelse!" he screeched, and dashed off.

There was a moment of silence as we all took in the total and complete awkwardness of what just happened.
And then we laughed our butts of for, like, the rest of the day.




1 comment:

  1. omghahahhahaahah how did you never tell me about this!!! wow that poor guy lol

    ReplyDelete