social ineptitude

Today was roommate Rose's despedida, goodbye party, occasion for good food, too much wine, the uncountable "occasional" cigarettes and opportunity for me to retrospectively admire the current heights of my social ineptitude. I am trying to cling to the idea that it is not me, it is cultural. My conviction, shaky to begin with, reached the flimsy stages of a fatamorgana about ten minutes into the evening.

My sins read more or less like this:

- I start overly aggressively communicative, trying to make up for the times when I refused the whole cumba-party atmosphere, coming home from a failed tango lesson and a fresh fight with R, only to go straight to my room, defensively thinking: This is freedom too ...

Anyway, I am thinking of that, they are thinking (I guess): Is she high? Or newly deafmute?

- I try to make jokes. That's my worst sin I think. Half-way through the joke I realize it does not sound funny in Spanish (that could be my Spanish) and therefore no-one understands, therefore I try to change the joke or the general drift of what I am saying, making it now completely unintellegible. Nobody laughs, but everybody looks at me very patiently and between pity and boredom. I swear I can hear R's brain sometimes.

- After the inappropriate jokes that noone understands as a joke - mostly it's a problem of irony - and now that they already think I am an idiot, to top it off I start political topics that only interest me.

When people respond to the topic, I am so enthusiastic (and intellectually starved I might add) that I drown them in my questions : Instead of encouraging to elaborate I kill the moment. (is there a "moment" for political conversations? I feel sometimes there is, some people have to get drunk, some have to trust you, some have to suddenly discover a momentary interest in the subject or in uttering an opinion...)

- Being the positive and life-loving person that I am as you all know so well, I think: Well, that could have been worse! and in an attempt to seize the moment I ask for some girl's phone number because "we" won't be here for her birthday but at some dude's wedding in el campo (I will report).

I fully intended to flatter her and make her feel important, but somehow the question must have come out rather rude and demanding. Yet I was not sure whether it's worth getting into a rectifying "no-I-really-meant"- discussion or to shut up, not talk so much, so loud, so OFF in general and just hope (and pray) she sees through my social handicaps some better person that should be somewhere inside me.

Really.

I was never queen of sociality but I was doing ok at one point, can you forget how to do that?