Week Thirty-Seven: "This what I get for trying to avoid social interaction."

Before I say anything else, I want to make it perfectly clear that this story is one hundred percent true, not embellished by anything, exactly as I remember it. All right. Here we go.

Because of Tropical Storm Irene, our home and surrounding property sustained damage, so we put in a request to FEMA for disaster relief. On Sunday, the FEMA guy* came to our house to assess the damage.

Being the socially suave animal that I am, I always feel awkward when service people come to the house and I'm just sitting there, doing nothing, or carrying on with my normal life. I realize that I don't need to feel awkward, but the fact remains that I do. There's something that feels just WRONG with just having jelly toast when the furnace man is working his butt off and I'm doing nothing to help, not even paying any attention to him.

I actually had the conscious thought "I don't feel like being social right now", so instead of remaining at the kitchen table and continuing to work on a plan for NaNoWriMo (like a normal person would), I decided to take my noveling folder and head upstairs to my room, to essentially hide away until the FEMA guy had gone. Since there was no damage to the upstairs, I figured that I would be out of the way. I sat down on my bed and put my headphones on, turned up the Jonathan Coulton music** and pulled out my pen.

Everything was wonderful until mom called up the stairs "We're coming up there, are you okay?" now, this might be a normal occurrence in someone else's home, but my room isn't a mom-free zone, and announcing her presence as she came up the stairs is something that just never happens. Even though it was a normal thing to say, it felt like she was yelling "come on, make sure you've got your pants on."

So I looked up from my writing, and suddenly, I realized that I had left at least three bras on my desk, the middle of the floor, and on my CD rack. Panicking now, I ran around like mad, scooping up my underthings from their precarious positions where they had been strewn, and cursing my untidy nature. Finally, I managed to corral my brassieres, and had just managed to tuck them away in the bra-housing-place, when the FEMA guy came up the stairs. I posed myself in what I hoped was a casual place, over by my desk.

This would have been a perfectly fine idea if I had followed through with actually being interested in what was on my desk, but because of my aforementioned untidy nature, there was a stack of clean laundry to put away, a pile of cd's, and no place to work on something that would genuinely hold my attention for a few minutes, so I did what any normal person would do. I just sort of stood there, watching him and smiling like a loon.

My mom, standing behind him, having no idea why I looked the the cat that had just eaten the proverbial canary, kept giving me looks, trying to ask me what on earth was up by only using her eyes. Of course, all I could do was continue to smile at her, in what I hoped was a charming manner, all the while thinking "Oh god, this what I get for trying to avoid social interaction".

He just kind of looked at me, after he finished measuring the room and said, "Well, I'll let you get back to what you were doing, then". I think I thanked him and then he left, so I got out my guitar and played some wizard rock***.

After a little while, I thought that it might be awkward if I stayed in my room for the whole time the FEMA guy was here, so I packed up my stuff and made my way downstairs. My sister, who had the sense to remain at the kitchen table and keep on with her sewing project, saw me return from my hidey-hole, and without my needing to say a single word, casually said "He's outside".

I spent the rest of his visit pretending to play it really cool, but paying VERY close attention to the door to see if Mister FEMA Man was going to return.

He didn't.

The moral of this story is twofold. One, I am a gloriously socially awkward human being, and two, hiding from the FEMA man only makes it worse.

Good people of the blog, this is my brain. Good night.

* Dear FEMA guy: if you are reading this, I hope I amused you, and that you didn't think I was hiding drugs in my room or something.

** The amount of time I've spent listening to The Princess Who Saved Herself and watching the Doctor Who music video that a fan did to go along with it is absurd.

*** Story of my life, people.