awkward

Sometimes I wonder if my social skills will ever recover from graduate school.

Once last semester, right after that final grueling summer of my M. Div., I accidentally introduced myself with the wrong name. I was meeting a friend's (now ex-) girlfriend from out of town. My friend Olivia, one of the hosting our gathering, introduced everyone in the room. She started with me, "Kelli, this is Meredith. Meredith, this is..." I broke in and meant to supply my name as I amiably stretched out a hand to shake hers. The hand was extended successfully, but the overly confident words that came out of my mouth were, oddly enough, "Hi, I'm Meredith." At the same time, that I claimed my new acquaintance's name was my own, Olivia finished her part of the introduction, "...Kelli." Kaylynn, after she stopped laughing at me (it took a while), remarked, "If I didn't know who you are, I would have believed that your name is Meredith. You said it with such confidence." It was a bad day for social awkwardness.

Most of the time my social blunders are less conspicuous, like saying obnoxious scholarly words in ordinary conversation. At one point over Christmas break, I found myself explaining what an inclusio is to a 3rd grader. (That was a low point of my social awkwardness. It just came flying out of my mouth before I could stop it! I'm blaming exegesis, David and Jon for this one. ;) ) This week I ran into some friends at a local restaurant and we were chatting casually when I found the word "culpable" on my lips. One friend kindly mocked me. Really - I don't try to do this - these things just come to mind before other, more commonplace words. I end up feeling like I'm being pretentious... even though I'm not trying to impress anyone.

You've lived in West Texas too long when...

... You're grading papers and have to look up the proper conjugation of the English word 'drag.'

In case anyone out there is wondering, the past tense of this verb is not 'drug.' It's 'dragged.' For example, you would say, "I dragged myself out of bed," not "I drug myself out of bed." But I've lived in Texas long enough to read 'drug,' think it's wrong, and then think, "But I hear it all the time!" (A flawed system for understanding how to write properly in English if there ever was one... but it's my normal system.) I'm sitting in the coffee shop where I work, so I asked around. None of us could decide - my co-workers decided that either conjugation is valid (even grammar is relative these days). We even entertained the idea that the use of a helping verb might distinguish 'dragged' from 'drug.' Then I looked it up (because I can't go on with life without satisfying my grammatical curiosity), confirmed my initial suspicions that the past tense is indeed 'dragged' (never 'drug'!), and thought, "I've lived in Texas a long time."