A Socially Awkward Childhood

It's been way too long since my last post, and I apologize for my tardiness. I spent four awesome weeks traveling with the men and womens basketball teams (If you don't already know, I'm in the UNC band). My travels included going to Albuquerque, NM and Spokane, WA and I was having waaaaaay too much fun to even think about writing a blog post. But I'm back.

Since I have only been covering socially awkward situations that happen to everyone, I have decided it is time to share a personal story about my awkward childhood antics. There were many.

I know what you're thinking,

"Becca, how could you possibly have had an awkward childhood? You're so normal."


OK...maybe you aren't thinking that. I'll pretend. Here goes.

Before I even knew North Carolina existed, and before the thought of playing trombone had ever crossed my mind, I lived in California and attended kindergarten at a school called St. Phillips. At St. Phillips we were taught to read and write pretty early and were periodically asked to write stories that would later be read in class. My class would be led to the computer lab about once a week, and we would write our stories.

Because I have always lacked an imagination, I would briefly search through clip art before writing my story. Finding a picture to write about helped me come up with a few ideas (after a while, I only searched through clip art to kill time, knowing full well that I would use the same picture as before).  At the time, I was aspiring to be an astronomer just like daddy (I have since realized that I can't do math or physics). So naturally, the first thing that I would type in to clip art was "space".

This was always my favorite out of the pictures that came up.

After choosing my inspirational picture, I would then begin to write my story. There was only one problem...

No one ever taught me to use the space bar.

onceuponatimtherwasanaleinnamedbob.bobluvedtocokhotdogswithhisastronatfreindjoe.onedaytheywercokinghotdogsandbobexploded.theend.

Roughly translated to:
Once upon a tim ther was an alein named Bob. Bob luved to cok hot dogs with his astronat freind Joe. One day they wer coking hot dogs and Bob exploded. The end.

My stories always happened to be way too eloquent for my teachers. So eloquent in fact, that one day, after a few attempts at starting to read my awesome stories, my teacher called upon the author to translate. It was then that I realized the awesomely constructed story, one that rivaled Ralphy Parker's "What I Want for Christmas" theme, was illegible.

I stood paralyzed at the front of the class trying to make out the words of my story, unable to figure out what went wrong. This was about as traumatizing as it gets for a four year old. Not to mention EXTREMELY awkward. I couldn't read it. No matter how hard I tried. Eventually I gave up and hung my head as a walked back to my little piece of carpet where I would listen to the rest of my classmates' stories.

The next few trips to the computer lab I continued with my same story writing techniques and was called up to read my story at least one more time. I was so embarrassed that I resolved to figure out what was wrong with my stories the next time I went to the computer lab.

I picked out my alien picture and then took an awkward peek at my neighbors keyboard (I'm pretty sure she noticed. Awkward). She was hitting this big button at the bottom of the key board an awful lot. I decided to press it too. The cursor moved forward, but there were no words. "SPACES!" I thought. That was what my story was missing. I needed to put space between the words. From that point on, my stories were legible. My teachers read them and I beamed with pride when the class laughed at my story endings that were usually "he exploded". Thank goodness for kindergarten humor.

To this day, I don't know why I had to figure out the space bar myself. Most teachers would probably have corrected me after my first illegible story, but no one did. In the long run though, all of this turned out to be beneficial. Since then, I have had no trouble talking to groups of people because now everything I talk about is prepared. I have not yet encountered anything worse than getting up in front of people with a story that can't possibly be read.

And that's one of my many awkward childhood stories. Hope you enjoyed it.

-The Socially Awkward Trombone