I don’t really get embarrassed anymore– no, really. I don’t know how that is possible, since I spent most of my childhood mortified for one reason or another, but somewhere between starting college and working two summers at camp, I became highly immune to embarrassment... which is probably another reason why I have done so well in France. Not getting embarrassed, though, is NOT synonymous with not being awkward. All of my most easily embarrassed friends are also the least awkward... I, on the other hand, am impossible to embarrass but I also find it completely impossible to be NOT awkward. Alors, I present for your reading pleasure:

Top 8 Awkward Moments since I arrived in France:

8. Crying in a phone booth on the Boulevard du President Kennedy when I had no luggage and couldn’t figure out how to call the US, then turning around to see a line of people waiting to USE the phone booth, watching me have a Mariah-Carey-esque breakdown in the plexiglas rectangle.

7. Acting out two people being in a box instead of in a nightclub when playing charades in my grammar class. Is it MY fault the words are almost the same in French?

6. Two Spanish guys asking a [girl] friend and I in French if we "wanted to kiss." How are you supposed to respond to that other than with a resounding "Actually... NO!"

5. My archaeology professor blurting out, in the middle of my oral final exam, "You forgot the
orgies," after my explanation of what went on in Roman triclinia.

4. Walking into the doctor’s office to be told, in English, by a French doctor, "You’re fucked." I don’t THINK she knew exactly what it meant.*

3. Saying to my 25-year-old professor: "Do you want me?" instead of "When should I take the final exam?"

2. Being asked out by the guy who works at the cheese counter at my grocery store WHILE almost being run over by a zamboni.

And number 1: Walking into my kitchen one morning in my pajamas when Madame was out of town, only to find that there was an entire WALL missing and a repairman standing on a ladder in front of the gap who greeted me with "How are you?" in French. At 6am. (Upon telling a friend this story, she responded with "how do you know he was a repairman? He could have been a burglar!" "Yeah," I answered, "but he was INSIDE the house... how would he have gotten in?" "Duh! You said there was a wall missing– he probably blasted out the wall, climbed in, put his ladder over the other side and was busy climbing in when you interrupted him.")

*The fact that I don’t think I ever explained the background to this doctor story occurred to me after I wrote it. A note of background: I had been in France about a week and a half when I realized that nearly passing out every time I had to stand up for more than 15 minutes was not normal, and that I should probably go to a doctor. I made an appointment with a bilingual doctor, and I’ll spare you the story of the whole incident, because there is an awful lot of complicated details, of which my favorite are these: the doctor had no reception staff, so she knew that I was American and young just from talking to me on the phone. Awhile after I arrived, the doctor herself walked into the waiting room, looked at me and said, "I’ve gotta see the old lady first, but you’re next, ok?" in French, in FRONT OF the "old lady." I get called back eventually, she takes my temperature with a mercury filled thermometer and flips out because my temperature is, like, 40 or something. I looked at her blankly and she fished around in her desk until she found a conversion chart– no wonder she flipped out, I was on Advil to keep my fever down and it was still 104. Having finally convinced herself that I didn’t have strep, she ordered me to the lab down the street for mono tests, where I dutifully reported the next morning to have my blood drawn by a guy who didn’t wear gloves in a 19th century apartment building. Oh, he didn’t use tubes either, just a needle with a funnel attached to it.
I walked back in to her office that night to see her sitting behind her desk. "Sit down," she gestured, which I did, and her next words were, I kid you not, "Well, you’re fucked."
If that were to happen now, I would probably be more surprised than I was then– everything was so new then that I couldn’t really process anything, and I remember telling myself, "It must be a French word..." before I realized that it definitely wasn’t.

Now, wait– as though the whole thing wasn’t ridiculous enough: this woman was at least my mother’s age, dressed very classily in a white lab coat and heels. She was a wonderful doctor and SO nice to me, and so helpful when she realized I had no idea what I was doing, even calling MY fellow-family-practitioner father to explain to him PRECISELY why I was so... well... you know.
She learned English when she went to undergrad in the US, so my only guess is that she picked up that word in the States and never really learned the implications of it. Obviously curse words don’t really translate, and though there are equivalents in French, there is not really anything AS bad. It was the first really big run in I had with the language barrier, and the funny part is that I forgot about it immediately afterward, because the next words out of her mouth were "you have mono." It was a couple days later before the whole situation occurred to me again, and it was months later before I really thought it was funny. The other best part of that whole event was her telling me that I needed to "stop kissing people!" as though I had been busy making out with everyone in her waiting room. She also warned me that I should probably not tell anyone because in France there is a stigma attached to mono in kind of the same way that there is a stigma attached to, like, herpes in the US. And the best part was that I got it from, like, sharing a drink or something not even sketchy.

Oh, B, you've done it now...