Awkward Chic

I know I haven't posted here for awhile, and for that, I apologize. But in order to make it up to you, I have decided to recall here an embarrassing story. Well, two parts embarrassing, one part great. Let me preface this by saying that when I do something embarrassing, something that I'd truly like people to forget, I tend to just tell a bunch of people to get it over with. It's a knee-jerk reaction, but it works for me.

So:

Today, Aimee Bender came to read at Google as part of the Authors@Google program. Bender is a writer I've admired from afar for quite awhile. Her prose is cozy somehow, comforting in its darkness, familiar in its fairytale qualities. She mentioned, during the Q&A session after her reading, that she hopes readers come away from her work feeling oddly satisfied; that is, satisfied without knowing quite why. And indeed that's how I feel when I read - for example - Willful Creatures. It's as though I've woken up from a particularly allegorical dream, but there's no rush to examine it, I can still lay in bed awhile longer.

At any rate, after the reading I got to have lunch with Aimee, showing her and several of her friends around the bizarre labyrinth of Google's main campus ("On your left you'll see our dinosaur, surrounded by pink flamingos..."). She was very conversational, nice enough to answer the questions that me and the other Authors@ team members peppered her with while we ate.

So what's the embarrassing part? After lunch as we were leaving, I asked Aimee Bender to be my best friend. I don't know why I phrased it that way - what I meant was "A bunch of wonderful authors come to visit Google, and when they turn out to be incredible people as well I feel like I know them, and I wish I could hang out with them more" (that's one of the liabilities of the Google sense of entitlement - it feels like people should want to just hang out with us).

But I phrased it "Be my best friend!", because deep down I am just an awkwardly enthusiastic girl who occasionally speaks before she thinks. Obviously, not too very deep down.

Anyway, that is my story. If you want, you should reply to this post with embarrassing stories of your own, turning this one silly post into a teen TigerBeat type forum for humiliating self-discovery. Doesn't that sound fun?



***In the meantime, you should check out this one other Aimee Bender story/collaboration, because I think it's great:

Hotel Rot