Loitering

And lo, it came to me then, that verily I am terrible at loitering.

Seriously.

I think there is a skill you learn when you are a teenager and don't want to go home, and I think the skill is that of loitering.

In my home town loitering was done around the square. On Friday and Saturday nights teenagers would get in their cars and in their friends' cars and drive around the square. Then they would drive out to the edge of town to the bowling alley, circle around and drive back to the square. They "cruised" until it was boring or they saw someone they wanted to hang out with and then they would go park on the square and loiter with more people than could fit in one car. (Sometimes this happened at a gas station on "the strip" or the bowling alley, but the square had a heck of a lot more parking spaces than anywhere else in town.)

I was a gigantic nerd/goody-two-shoes/stick-in-the-mud and I did this one time. In part because I lived in the country and wasn't in town on Friday or Saturday nights, in part because I didn't have a car, and in part because none of my friends really did this very often.

But I think that in missing out on this Scotland County right of passage I missed out on a valuable learned talent: How to just stand around.

I can't do it. I hate the random eye contact where I don't know what to say. I suck at small talk. I never know how to interject myself into a conversation that someone else is having, and above all this I have a very intense fear of being disliked or annoying people... which might be one of my most annoying traits, paradoxically.

I know how to look at my phone as if something very interesting is happening on it, but that is just a time-killer, not a connection-maker. I can hold a reasonable conversation with people. I can even yell out "Hippopotamus!" in a room full of people whom I all want to like me.

But when an event is over, if I don't have a reason I can't leave (aka riding with someone else) or a good friend to chat with, I'm screwed and I end up running away even when there are a few people who I would like to say hello to, or greet, or otherwise acknowledge.

This is why I'm so much better at online interaction than in person interaction. My feelings don't get hurt if someone makes a face at something I say online or ignores a facebook status and I can't just pick up from their body language when they really don't care for me.

I'm like the "True Life Tales of a Cinderella Time-Dud."