Amusingly, the day after this comic was published, the same thing happened to me (I’ll wait while you click on the link and take the ten seconds to be amused by the comic): I bumped into a classmate, we talked for a short while, then said goodbye… and realized we were both going to the same place.
After we parted ways there, about five minutes later we ran into each other again. The exchange was a quick smile, shifty eye contact, and a sort of hasty rush to go our separate ways again.
It’s not that we don’t get along—I’ve always quite liked this classmate and I think that she likes me well enough too—but there’s something about saying goodbye to someone you don’t really know, and then being forced to continue walking with them after you both thought the conversation was over, that is rather uncomfortable. And it’s something which happens frequently in a university as small as the University of Winnipeg. There are, after all, only so many directions that a person can take, and that space is even more limited when you narrow it down to people within specific departments.
These awkward social situations enhance our vulnerabilities, and we simply don’t enjoy being placed in a vulnerable position. It’s awkward; it’s uncomfortable.
What amuses me the most about the context is that in the comic, the characters address the fact that they feel uncomfortable, and they express their discomfort through some cheeky anger; in the situation between this classmate and I, we did not address our discomfort, yet we are both Rhetoric majors, so I expect we both would have found it fascinating to examine our own vulnerability.
But we did not. Because we felt uncomfortable. Even when our area of study is to analyze what other disciplines deliberately avoid seeing, we still sometimes shy away from analyzing situations when we ourselves are directly involved.
I’m a lover of awkward humour, so honestly I tend to find those situations amusing as I’m put in them. Given the opportunity, often as a way to alleviate my own awkwardness, I use the situation to make the other person even MORE awkward. I get to laugh as they squirm, and because the situation has become nothing but a joke, I’m free of the awkwardness myself.
Richard- I find these situations rather amusing as well, but mostly because I feel my own awkwardness within it. It CAN be funny to watch other people squirm- but I think that, for me at least, it’s mostly because I can see myself in them: I too am squirming and it’s interesting how we all have such similar reactions. I get a real kick out of the fact that we can be aware of the awkwardness and still be awkward about it.