Self-Flagellation

I am a great believer in the cataloguing of all my flaws. Because (1) I'm not just a little crazy and (2) for the most part, I can live with them and enumerating them lets me feel like I have some control over how they effect me. So without further ado:

I am unbelievably clumsy, I make horrible jokes, I cannot cook to save my life, I have scary deep-set eyes. I play too many video games, I'm horribly shy, and as such am a ridiculously bad conversationalist. I'm cheap, I read too many books, I'm crazy pale. I use too many big words and can be a grammar freak. I can't make a decision to save my life. I make terrible first impressions and am very off-putting to a lot of people. I'm a huge dork. I tell long and meandering and boring stories with little-to-no relevance to anything in the actual world. I'm way lazy and watch too much TV and never exercise. I have bad fashion sense and usually look like I was dressed by a colorblind person with no concept of style. I have a very oddly shaped head, with multiple points where there should be none. My hair looks like a ski-slope.

This is me, carefully and considerably condensed into bite-sized chunks. And I'm mostly cool with that. Some of the things I am able to mask through the magic of pretending to act normal (I can maintain a facade in public, wherein I don't use any big words, correct peoples grammar, or talk excessively about TV), other things I embrace as little quirks that are naturally a part of me (basically anything physical, primarily because I'm way too cheap to get any sort of corrective surgery). Other things I actively hate, but can seem to do nothing about, no matter how hard I try (see: shyness, conversation skills, decision making, and fixing my goddamn hair into something other than a freakin' ski-slope configuration).

Aaaanyways, (I swear I was going somewhere with this) this is to give you some manner of a guide to what is constantly going on in my head when I meet new people. Because in normal everyday life around people I know, the list is just sort of the background noise that is my brain. Only when I do something hideously dorky amongst friends does my brain assert itself ("Wow! Stupid!" it says to me). But even then, these people know what to expect since, by God, they've been around this long it should be expected by now.

But with new people it's like one huge ticker-tape marquee loop in my brain: "Why aren't you talking?! You're too quiet! Say something! But nothing dorky! No stories! Quit looking so shifty! I swear to God, I'll go on strike if you mention anything about TV or grammar! Don't knock that thing over! Don't trip..." And on and on, forever.

Which I'm pretty sure should probably require some form of therapy, because, come on. Although mostly this just resolves into me looking incredibly shy, because my brain can't complain too much if I don't say anything. It just gets stuck on "Why aren't you saying anything?! Why aren't you saying anything?!" and I can totally handle that. Sometimes I even say very innocuous things.

And now that I've gone through all of that, let me just say: Oh my God, why am I so awkward? For serious, people. I should be studied.

(This exercise in self-hating has been brought to you by Jason's total lack of common social skills. And the letter Q.)