Lord Grey II
30-01-2005, 18:32
Have you ever really embarrassed yourself? Don't answer that stupid. It's a rhetorical question. Of course you've embarrassed yourself. Everybody has. I bet the pope has. If you were to say to the pope: "Your Holy Worshipfulness, I bet you've pulled some blockheaded boners in your day, huh?", he'd smile that warm, knowing, fatherly smile he has, and then he'd wave. He can't hear a word you're saying, when he's up on that balcony of his.
But my point is that if you've ever done anything humiliating, you've probably noticed that your brain NEVER lets you forget about it. This is the same brain that never remembers things it SHOULD remember. If you were bleeding to death and the emergency-room doctor asked you what blood-type you were, you'd say, "I think it's B. Or maybe C. I'm pretty sure it was a letter." But if your doctor asked you to describe the skirt you were wearing when you were doing the Mashed Potatoes in the 9th grade dance competition in front of 350 people, and your underwear, which had holes in it, fell to your ankles, you'd say, without hesitaing for a millisecond, "It was gray felt with a pink flocked poodle."
Your brain cerishes embarrassing moments. It likes to take them out and fondle them. This probably explains a lot of unexplained suicides. A successful man with a nice family and a good career will be out on his patio, cooking hamburgers, seemingly without a care in the world, when his brain, rummaging through it's humiliating-incidents collection, selects an old favorite, which it replays for the zillionth time, and the man is so suddenly overcome with shame that he stabs himself in the skull with his barbecue fork. At the funeral, people say how shocking it was, a seemingly happy and well-adjusted person choosing to end it all. They assume he must have terrible dark secrets involving drugs or organized crime or dressing members of the family in flimsy undergarments. Little do they know he was thinking about the time in Social Studies class back in 1986 when he discovered a hard-to-reach pimple roughly halfway down his back, and he got to working on it, subtly at first, but with gradually increasing intensity, eventually losing track of were he was, when suddenly he realized the room had become silent, and he looked up, with his arm stuck halfway down his back of his shirt, and he saw that EVERYBODY in the class, including the TEACHER, was watching what he was doing, and he knew that they would give him a cruel nickname that would stick for the rest of his life, even if he had been appointed Chief Justice of the U.S Supreme Court, the instant his classmates saw him, they'd shriek, "Hey look, it's ZIT!"
Everybody has moments like this. My mother is always reliving the time she lost her car in a shopping-center parking lot, and she was around with several large shopping bags and two small children, looking helpless, and after a while other shoppers took pity on her and offered to help. "It's a Black Chevrolet," she'd told them, over and over. And they searched and searched and searched for it. They were extremely nice. They all agreed that it can be damned easy to lose your car in these big parking lots. They had been there an hour, some of them, searching for this Black Chevrolet, and it was getting dark, when my mother suddenly remembered that several days earlier we had bought a new car. "I'm sorry!" She told people, smiling brightly so they could see what a humorous situation it was, "It's not a Black Chevrolet! It's a yellow Ford!" She kept smiling as they edged away, keeping their eyes on her.
My own personal brain is forever dredging up the time in 9th grade when I took a girl, a very attractive girl whom I had a life-threatening crush on, to a dance. I was standing in the gym next to her, holding her hand, thinking what a cool couple we made-Steve Sauve and His Gorgeous Date- when a couple of my friends sidled up to me and observed that, over on the other side, my date was using her spare hand to hold hand with another guy. This was of course a much better looking guy. This was Paul Newman when he was young, only taller.
Several of my friends gathered to watch. I thought: what am I supposed to do here? Hit the guy? That would have been asking for a lifetime of dental problems. He was a varsity-football player, probably older than me, and I was on the Dance Committee, a total geek. I also had to rule out hitting my date. The ideal move would have been to spontaneously bursting into flames and die. I have read this sometimes happens to people, but you never get a break like that when you need it.
Finally I turned to my date, dropped her hand, looked her square in the eye, and said the following: "Um." Just like that. "Um." My brain absolutely loves to remember this. "Way to go Tony!" It shrieks to me, when I'm stopped at red lights 2 years later. Talk about eloquent! My brain can't get over what a geek I was(maybe still am). It's always coming up with much better ideas for things I could have said. I should start writing them down, just in case we develop time travel. I'd go back to the gym with a whole rolodex file filled with remarks, and I'd read them to my date over the course of a couple of hours. Wouldn't SHE feel awful! Ha ha!
It just occured to me that she might be out there right now, reading this, in which I want to state for the record I am doing absolutely fine, leading an absolutely wonderful life, and probably will get a good job, good family, good house, and I will eventually be cooking hamburgers out on our patio.
But my point is that if you've ever done anything humiliating, you've probably noticed that your brain NEVER lets you forget about it. This is the same brain that never remembers things it SHOULD remember. If you were bleeding to death and the emergency-room doctor asked you what blood-type you were, you'd say, "I think it's B. Or maybe C. I'm pretty sure it was a letter." But if your doctor asked you to describe the skirt you were wearing when you were doing the Mashed Potatoes in the 9th grade dance competition in front of 350 people, and your underwear, which had holes in it, fell to your ankles, you'd say, without hesitaing for a millisecond, "It was gray felt with a pink flocked poodle."
Your brain cerishes embarrassing moments. It likes to take them out and fondle them. This probably explains a lot of unexplained suicides. A successful man with a nice family and a good career will be out on his patio, cooking hamburgers, seemingly without a care in the world, when his brain, rummaging through it's humiliating-incidents collection, selects an old favorite, which it replays for the zillionth time, and the man is so suddenly overcome with shame that he stabs himself in the skull with his barbecue fork. At the funeral, people say how shocking it was, a seemingly happy and well-adjusted person choosing to end it all. They assume he must have terrible dark secrets involving drugs or organized crime or dressing members of the family in flimsy undergarments. Little do they know he was thinking about the time in Social Studies class back in 1986 when he discovered a hard-to-reach pimple roughly halfway down his back, and he got to working on it, subtly at first, but with gradually increasing intensity, eventually losing track of were he was, when suddenly he realized the room had become silent, and he looked up, with his arm stuck halfway down his back of his shirt, and he saw that EVERYBODY in the class, including the TEACHER, was watching what he was doing, and he knew that they would give him a cruel nickname that would stick for the rest of his life, even if he had been appointed Chief Justice of the U.S Supreme Court, the instant his classmates saw him, they'd shriek, "Hey look, it's ZIT!"
Everybody has moments like this. My mother is always reliving the time she lost her car in a shopping-center parking lot, and she was around with several large shopping bags and two small children, looking helpless, and after a while other shoppers took pity on her and offered to help. "It's a Black Chevrolet," she'd told them, over and over. And they searched and searched and searched for it. They were extremely nice. They all agreed that it can be damned easy to lose your car in these big parking lots. They had been there an hour, some of them, searching for this Black Chevrolet, and it was getting dark, when my mother suddenly remembered that several days earlier we had bought a new car. "I'm sorry!" She told people, smiling brightly so they could see what a humorous situation it was, "It's not a Black Chevrolet! It's a yellow Ford!" She kept smiling as they edged away, keeping their eyes on her.
My own personal brain is forever dredging up the time in 9th grade when I took a girl, a very attractive girl whom I had a life-threatening crush on, to a dance. I was standing in the gym next to her, holding her hand, thinking what a cool couple we made-Steve Sauve and His Gorgeous Date- when a couple of my friends sidled up to me and observed that, over on the other side, my date was using her spare hand to hold hand with another guy. This was of course a much better looking guy. This was Paul Newman when he was young, only taller.
Several of my friends gathered to watch. I thought: what am I supposed to do here? Hit the guy? That would have been asking for a lifetime of dental problems. He was a varsity-football player, probably older than me, and I was on the Dance Committee, a total geek. I also had to rule out hitting my date. The ideal move would have been to spontaneously bursting into flames and die. I have read this sometimes happens to people, but you never get a break like that when you need it.
Finally I turned to my date, dropped her hand, looked her square in the eye, and said the following: "Um." Just like that. "Um." My brain absolutely loves to remember this. "Way to go Tony!" It shrieks to me, when I'm stopped at red lights 2 years later. Talk about eloquent! My brain can't get over what a geek I was(maybe still am). It's always coming up with much better ideas for things I could have said. I should start writing them down, just in case we develop time travel. I'd go back to the gym with a whole rolodex file filled with remarks, and I'd read them to my date over the course of a couple of hours. Wouldn't SHE feel awful! Ha ha!
It just occured to me that she might be out there right now, reading this, in which I want to state for the record I am doing absolutely fine, leading an absolutely wonderful life, and probably will get a good job, good family, good house, and I will eventually be cooking hamburgers out on our patio.