Put Her There...Where!!?

written by the vassar comikaze

I was on the 6 train with a lady friend of mine, enjoying a nice, platonic conversation when I noticed we were approaching my stop. “Time to say goodbye” I thought, “please don’t be awkward.” The safest thing to do is hug a girl in this situation, but we were both sitting down so it was too difficult to pull off. The alternative was giving her a peck on the cheek, but I hate doing that. I’m afraid that I’m going to leave a spitty-ass grandpa kiss on the side of the girl’s face, causing her to wipe it off and tell her friends not to fuck me.

The train was slowing down and pulling into Spring street. “Oh shit, hug her. Hug her!” I stood up to give her a hug but she didn’t stand up. “Fuck!” Panicking, I leaned down to give her a hug, accidentally pulling her head into my groin. I held her there a little too long, making her pull away and start laughing. “Yeah, haha, I’m bad at goodbyes. Nick, you’re a fucking retard.”

Saying hello and goodbye to people has become a somewhat stressful activity for me. My problem is that I have no idea what people are going to do. Say you go up to a guy and he puts out his hand. Unless you’ve gone through this with him before, you don’t know what his default handshake is. He could be a clasper, a clasp pounder, a clasp snapper, a clasp snapping snapper, or maybe he just wants to shake your hand! It could be anything.

I always guess incorrectly. I end up clasping, making some wacky ass gestures with my hand and then going in for a man hug to make it look like I know what I’m doing. Sometimes people don’t hug back and I feel like a gay. I recover by pulling away quickly and crying inside.

The only thing I feel confident about is when someone puts out a hand in the high five position. All you have to do is make contact…nice and simple. Of course, every once in a while you meet a macho asshole that manages to fuck it up. They think that a high five is an excuse to smack my hand with everything they have. It isn’t. All it does is make me yelp and want to hit you.

Individual greetings/goodbyes are tough enough, but the group process can be a bitch in its own right. Take saying goodbye to a large number of people. My preference is to say one loud bye to the entire group with a big wave, but there’s always some asshole that insists on doing individual goodbyes. He’ll do the exact same hug and or handshake with each of them, saying “peace” each time.

I hate those people. First of all, you need to stop wishing peace to everyone. You’re not John Lennon and you sure as fuck ain’t Gandhi. Second of all, it looks idiotic to do the same thing over and over again, not to mention the fact that a repetitive goodbye procedure defeats the purpose of your individual goodbyes. Most importantly, your goodbye makes my goodbye seem distant and awkward when all I’m trying to do is spare everyone the burden of saying “bye!” eight hundred times.

I wish the process didn’t have to be so complicated. If it were up to me, the only hello/goodbye custom would be the gleeful jump.