The Cute Girl Fail

           I’ve been offstage for about two minutes. I’m still feeling a lot of adrenaline – people laughing at your jokes is as good as any drug in the world, when they applaud and whistle after you tell a story it’s not unlike being on a plane that’s taking off. People are bobbing around, swarming the bar; it’s intermission. I’m standing by myself, because my only friend in the place is here in an official capacity and can’t exactly spend all her time hanging out with me.

            Out of the morass emerges a thin, good-looking blonde woman, maybe 28 years old. She approaches me – clearly nervous, as though I were a real celebrity – and says, “Hi, I’m Becky.”* And I’m all: Bleagh.

* I don’t actually remember her name. One thing I can tell you for a fact is that it was not Becky. Sorry, Becky. I’m sure your real name sounds less like that of a spunky tomboy in a 50s sitcom.

             Okay, I made a better show of if than that. We talked a little bit about storytelling, I learned she was from Orange County, and I told her that I did this because I would never go skydiving. (The number of times people approach you after a storytelling show and go, “You’re so brave, I could never do this!” is astronomically high. Enough to make me kinda-sorta believe that more people fear public speaking than death.) But the conversation fairly quickly petered out, and I could feel myself once again performing an act that I’ve grown fairly tired of: the cute girl fail.

            The cute girl fail goes like this: I tell a story. It’s funny, or sad, or (preferably) both. After the show, a cute girl plucks up her courage to come talk to me. (Speaking of things I would never do. I can get onstage in front of 300 people, but walking up and talking to a stranger after the show? Never. Never, ever.) She tells me my story was great. I say thanks. We kinda stare at each other for anywhere from 30 seconds to five minutes, exchanging very nonspecific pleasantries. I am intensely aware the whole time that I should be doing something different. Somehow this conversation should end with the cute girl’s phone number in my pocket. Instead, I descend into a sort of lockup that I know communicates something I don’t want to communicate: Please stop talking to me, cute girl. Your advances are unwelcome. Eventually, she says, “Well . . .” And then she wanders off.

            Becky stuck it out for a little while. I said something else that made her laugh – that felt like progress – but eventually we got to the, “Well . . .” moment. I said, “Glad you liked it.” Then she melted back into the crowd.

            After the show I was outside, waiting for an Uber, and Becky and her friend emerged from the venue. We made eye contact. She gave me a little wave. I like to think I smiled. But did I? Maybe I just stared at her like she was actively melting, eyes sliding down her face like fried eggs down a wall. Yikes, did I do that?

            FAIL.

Some Thoughts on Social Isolation

    I haven’t done a very good job of integrating back into Portland since I came back here. Some of that is that I haven’t really been here very much — I’ve spent maybe half of the last year in Bend, actually — but most of it is that every time I start building up a head of steam, I let it collapse. I fell out of the rotation at XRAY, the radio show I was helping out with seems to have petered out, I don’t fit in terribly well at the other radio station at which I work. I had gotten used to thinking of myself has having recently got back to town — but once you “get used” to that idea, doesn’t that mean it’s not true anymore? It’s been almost a year and a half since grad school ended, and almost nine months since I started paying rent on my place in Portland. And still I’m in a kind of socially isolated world, where the only people I really see are the people I buy stuff from, and occasionally my brothers.

    It’s a very, very dull mode of living, especially when a lot of the work you do (ie writing) requires solitude as well. Evenings, in particular, are a problem. Unless I’ve got a date — suddenly almost never, in the last couple of months — I have little to do but read, watch TV, and desultorily play video games. It’s not terrible, but it’s lonely. And lately, it makes me feel like I’m failing to reengage with my life, though the reasons seem a little obscure.

    I’ve always had a vague sense that I make a bad first impression. Probably this is mostly social anxiety — but the cruel irony of social anxiety is that being worried about making a bad impression can lead to making a bad impression. Occasionally it filters back to me that such-and-such a person finds me chilly and remote. I think this is because, especially when I’m out of practice, talking to people I don’t know very well stresses me out so much that I opt out of it. That’s where chilly and remote (or, depending on the interlocutor, stuck-up and full of himself) seems to come from.

    Now, I’ve made friends before. Not that long ago, even. But I feel like I’ve forgotten how. It’s dismaying that such an essential skill can go missing, even if only temporarily. What if it never comes back?

    I’ve been trying to take some steps to make myself do it. I bought a ticket to next week’s Moth. I used to do the Moth all the time; it’s how I made most of my friends in New York, who are generally among my favorite people. Somehow, though, that has felt trapped in amber to me, a thing that a younger, skinnier, more outgoing person who lived in New York would do. I wonder if maybe I was putting the cart before the horse, or something.

    And — let’s be honest about this — a fair amount of it has to do with my weight. I have been struggling to lose weight for the last few months, with much less success than I anticipated from resuming serious distance running. I managed to shave off somewhere around 15 pounds so that I’m now merely overweight, as opposed to geniunely fat. That’s nice, I guess, but all summer I’ve been running, and trying to be good about my food and beer intake (with less success), and the fact of the matter is that not another ounce has come off me. Sometimes it seems like I’ve actually gained weight in the last few months. Who runs 25 miles a week and gains weight? Me, I guess.

    When I’m not feeling good about how much I weigh, it gets in the way of everything. It exacerbates the social anxiety. It makes me not want to get up onstage. It means that I get up every day and the first thing I do is look in the mirror and think, “Well, you certainly are a fat sack of shit,” which is not exactly the kind of thing one thinks to himself before he strikes out and makes deep inroads in the social world of a new (or new-old, as the case may be in PDX) town. It means that I’m reluctant to fill out a profile at a dating site, which is the easiest way of meeting women in a new place, in my experience.

    Live Wire comes back in a couple of weeks; that’ll be good. And I’m trying to remember a story from my life that fits the theme “Betrayal” so I can go in the hat next week, but the fact of the matter is that I’m not a very complex social animal, and I don’t know that I’ve ever been betrayed, per se, because to be betrayed one would have to have a whole bunch of complicated balls in the air and have something go awry, socially-speaking. I’m sure I’ve betrayed other people, but I’m too fucking dumb to know when it might have been. Maybe I’ll have to go out and do something shitty to someone in the next few days so I’ll have a story to tell. Anybody want to volunteer?

    And now that we’ve reached the bottom of this well of self- pity, I’m going to wrap this up. I don’t have a bow to tie on this little rant, other than: maybe I never should have moved away from New York.