Innocuous things that make you irrationally embarrassed

Social awkwardness of the haircut is exacerbated by the WAIT, in old-school babrbers that don't take bookings. It's Saturday morning, I've got a powerful hangover and there are four guys in front of me. I've read the Mirror and last month's FHM, I should get up and leave, but no, that would be wasting the emotional commitment I've already made to be sitting there in the first place.

God, I used to hate going to the hairdressers. I had a stammer that was much more pronounced when I was a kid and the hairdressers was the perfect arena to intensify it: small talk, social anxieties with strangers, earnest young women, the strong sense of being isolated and observed. My issue was always 'W's and I could sit there for minutes at a time, blushing furiously, with a 'where/why' question stuck like a pebble in the antechamber of my mouth. I have a clear memory of being about 14, sitting in the chair with the little cloth cape around my neck, the hairdresser, a whirl of skin and perfume right there right there and my mum pressing a pound into my hand saying loudly 'give this to the lady'. The burning hole of shame is as fresh and livid as if it was yesterday.

So yeah, I grew my hair after that and got it cut professionally maybe twice? I skinned it in my mid-30s and now it's once a week, clippers with the guard off. I use a mirror for the front and my hands and ears to check the back.

whew chinaski that sounds awful. i have my complaints about barbers but didn't realize the extent to which they make so many people uncomfortable.

i went back to the "new guy" i found and he's perfect, the place is perfect. online appointments. music playing overhead is not great but not loud and ignorable. no small talk. he did a fantastic job on my beard trim / shave and used like 5 different products that smelled like cement but in a good way. when he did talk it was about what he was doing and he was very accurate in his questions / descriptions. pricey but worth it, somewhat reasonable for just the trim. why i'm posting this here i have no idea.

i guess i've gotten into the shave part and the hot towel and mini spa treatment, it's nice.

Oh, I love getting a barbershop shave. It is like a mini spa treatment. They always do a much better job than I ever do, and it feels damn good.

I got a haircut yesterday. I paid way too much and the haircut was not what I asked for but the conversation was really good.

i follow a lot of outdoors / national park / hiking / biking kinds of orgs on social media, and lately there is a push to make people aware that they should be packing out their feces in wag bags. which is great. but i'm a little embarrassed about how everyone loves poop humor online now, "funny" use of the poop emoji etc. i like poop humor!! part of the fun though is that it has to still be generally considered juvenile and inappropriate. and now it's like the internet has made it feel not like that and just another witty marketing campaign. another example of the internet ruining everything i guess.

POOP EMOJI was in the NYT crossword today

sorry

ah! bummer lol

make poop gross again

related: everyone calling covid wastewater tracking the "poop meter" or w/e

every adult using the word "poop" like a three-year-old

any use of the shortened slang phrase "inspo" meaning "inspiration"
unsurprisingly you hear this a lot in a pottery studio

Any adult British person using the word "poop"

Or even poo/lav/wee etc. Nothing wrong with shite/bog/slash.

Historians of naval architecture get a pass, I hope?

unless they haven't had enough fiber i imagine

was gonna mention Pelosi saying 'poo poo'

I don't like hearing adults say poo or poop ever - somehow it's smellier than shit or crap

friends with two of my husband's friends on facebook, a married couple. they are sweet. they are burners and fire spinners. one of them will like a meme that's like "you deserve to have limitless wealth" and tag the other, who then replies "so true" or something. idk man. it's innocuous. it's embarrassing. kind of think it's rationally embarrassing? people who just want their lives to be disneyland all the time. understandable but the aggressive thoughtlessness makes it seem creepy to me.

I have an acquaintance I added on facebook some years back, and he would appear in my timeline constantly because his girlfriend (now wife) tagged him in posts all the time about how much she loved him and how excited she was about their impending wedding, and then all the minutia around planning said wedding, which lasted literal years. I found it all fairly embarrassing and somewhat annoying, although I didn't care too much because I hardly knew them, but I can't imagine even their closest friends and relatives being super thrilled with these endless posts that really could have just been shared between the two of them and left everyone else out.

people performing their private lives publically are deeply baffling to me. also people who mistake social media for "the universe" or w/e.

if you like this 'you deserve to have limitless wealth' meme you will receive a limitless number of phishing texts per day.

back to work

at coffee machine small talk with colleague

ask him what he's doing here since he's usually in our other office

colleague explains that he is always in this office

I am an idiot

"hey, you got a haircut"

"yeah, i do that sometimes"

...

I have a loud voice so any time I like stub a toe or hit my leg/arm on something, I tend to yelp like I've been shot, and then people act all concerned "are you ok" and I feel sheepish like, i stubbed my toesie-wowsies, i'm ok, nevermind my loud dramatic ass.

the man who taught his asshole how to yelp -- a William S. Burroughs tribute

Getting congratulated on my work anniversary by my Linkedin connections.

― pplains, Wednesday, July 29, 2020 7:35 AM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

This would infuriate me but you already know that.

I always wonder what people think who hate their job and get these messages

"You hate your job? There's a support group for that. It's called 'everybody,' and we meet at the bar." - Drew Carey

You have the option to not show this info, and therefore not get these messages btw

For me personally, it's an innocuous thing that makes me irrationally embarrassed.

Maybe they feel like "Yes - despite my curses and agnosy I have stuck it out for three years! I win!"

once got a reminder to congratulate the work anniversary of . . . my ex-wife

does linkedin suggest any good responses?

I hear if you report your death they update your account to give an end date for your employment

do wonder if there are any people out there who give a shit about work anniversaries at all.

It'll sound a little cheesy but I do, if only to celebrate that this is one of the few things in my life I managed to do really well (though it does scare me that I've spent 40% of my life here)

But I don't really care about hearing about it from LinkedIn

SOme people want to know about work anniversaries becase after a while it means they get more time off per year

hah yeah I get a splash at 20 years. I already get like 30+ days off a year including holidays, not sure I need more, but will gladly take it and use it.

I’m coming up for 10 years at my current place (which yep I mainly know because I get an extra day added to my annual leave allowance)

I def have feelings about this lol

agree with pp about the LinkedIn thing - I think I would find most things about LinkedIn embarrassing tbh

Related to this is how every single company is doing that wretched Spotify year in review thing now, Mubi “these are the films you saw in 2023” sainsburys “take a look at how much rice you bought” stop fucking showing me my life! It’s embarrassing!

i was in a small museum gift shop yesterday and they were playing “here comes your man” by the pixies over the sound system. when it came to the chorus i sang “here comes your man” and at the exact same time another dad about six feet away also sang “here comes your man.” we didn’t acknowledge it but my son heard it and it was embarrassing

I get embarrassed when I get the lyrics wrong to a song I've known for years. Especially when it's in front of my kids.

My wife savagely (and rightly) mocked me for believing that the Talking Heads song "And She Was" included the lyric "and she could see an earmuff factory."

The lyric is, sadly, "she could see a nearby factory." Allegedly the factory that made Yoo-Hoo chocolate drink.

I was vindicated shortly thereafter, because she had spent 20 ywars misunderstanding the lyrics of the Elton John song "I Guess That's Why They Call it the Blues."

Specifically she sang "rolling like flounder," where the actual lyric is supposed to be "rolling like thunder."

When we started dating, we made a mixtape, and titled side A "Rolling Like Flounder," with the B side titled "Earmuff Factory."

I think there's a whole thread for this, but one time I got clowned hard by a girl who for some reason was friends with me, despite being vastly cooler than me in every way, for thinking the line from "Eyes Without a Face" was: "Got no human race".

Look over there / a dry ice factory / good place to get some thinking done / if only my ears weren't so cold

When The was 7 or 8 my mom bought me some brown corduroy pants that were supposed to be for special occasions. The sound of my thighs rubbing together as I walked was horribly embarrassing to me. I wasn’t a big kid, the embarrassment was totally irrational. But it killed me, I seriously thought about hiding them in the trash because I hated that noise so much. I don’t think I’ve owned corduroy since then.

Now that I think about it, I have always been embarrassed by corduroy unless it's really fine-grained and soft. It's bulky-looking and it crunches and rustles and I find all of that inexplicably awkward. Sometimes I forget and buy corduroy pants and then never wear them.

I had a similar reaction to a pair of corduroy pants as a kid.