Looking in

Hey look at that, it's Thursday already. No complaints here; I like it when the days stick to their traditional order. Seriously, how weird would that be if it were a variable thing? I guess if it had always been that way it wouldn't seem weird at all, but if it happened suddenly, then it would be one of the strangest events of my lifetime. You know what else is strange? My mind this morning. It's not quite functioning normally, so I'll try to hone in on a story and see if that rights the ship.

There are many awkward social situations that we find ourselves in fairly often. We've all been trapped in long conversations with boring people, wondering if we'd ever see our families again. We've spent hours painfully trying to remember from where we know someone who looks really familiar, and we've debated internally whether we could say anything about the food stuck in an acquaintance's teeth. A highly underrated awkward social situation is that of the outsider in a close-knit group.

I have a very tight core group of friends, and unless you're visiting UOPTA for the first time, you can probably name a few of them because they're so prominent in my stories. We speak our own language, one made up almost entirely of inside jokes and movie quotes. (By the way, "Inside Jokes and Movie Quotes" could easily be the name of this blog, now that I think about it. It's catchy, no? IJMQ doesn't have much of a ring to it though.) In fact, I've often said that I'm not sure that anything that comes out of my mouth at this point is original, because every intonation seems to recall a story or character. (That last sentence made me think of quoting both "Rush Hour" and "Private Parts," for example.) It's a sickness.

It would seem to be a harmless, victimless sickness if no one ever infiltrated our circle. Being friendly and sociable people though, we put the drawbridge down over the moat around us to welcome someone's friend or visiting cousin to hang out with us when we're together. We trust each other's choices of company, and the more the merrier. Whenever that's the case, I try as hard as I possibly can to stray from inside jokes. We've all been there, right? Someone from their high school comes up, and you politely smile as they laugh about who said what in which class. You pretend that the story is still just as entertaining to you, even though you weren't there. And then someone brings up another person in that class, and half an hour later, you've long abandoned that polite smile. I actively try to avoid that when there's a newbie hanging out with us. The problem is that it's frickin' impossible with my friends. Try as we might, we shift back into our comfort zone and spew out the ridiculous crap we normally talk about.

Still, I want to be clear that I try to be sensitive to the plight of the outsider. For I have been the one on the outside, gentle readers, and I feel their pain. I have two examples of such times that are a little different than what I explained above. I'll give the positive one first, and then the not-so-positive on Monday. That ok with you?

There's a Mexican rock group called Mana (accent on the second 'a', but I don't know how to do that). I'm a huge fan of their music, and I have been since my favorite brother bought me a cd of theirs in '95. I'm so white that it's not fashionable to be seen with me after Labor Day, but I do speak Spanish fairly well and truly love their music. So when they came to Santa Barbara, my lovely wife and I were thrilled to go to the concert. I owned every album including the double live one, so I was pretty confident that I'd know every song they played. Sure enough, as the concert went on (and totally rocked), I was singing along and enjoying every minute of it. Amber had listened to a bunch of their music, but didn't know it as well as me, so she'd turn to me every time an unfamiliar song would start. "Un Lobo Por Tu Amor," I'd say, "Second song on 'Suenos Liquidos.'"

Near the end of the concert, a few chords of a new song started. I looked up in the air and turned my head a little, trying to place it. Then the crowd erupted. Every single person around us started cheering and singing along to something I'd never heard before. It was a larger reception than any other song had received so far, and it perplexed the hell out of me. I turned to a stranger near me and asked what it was. He said the name of a song in Spanish, and upon seeing my confused face, he said, "It's a traditional Mexican song." So we sat there, surrounded by thousands of people all smiling and singing, feeling like the only two people in the world who didn't know the lyrics. And it was wonderful. It was such a rare experience for me to be completely outside of a group that I relished it for what it was.

So that was the positive outsider experience. Like I said earlier, I'll get to the not-so-positive one next week, after tomorrow's thrilling FUF installment. Please email me at ptklein@gmail.com with anything you've got for me. After all, everyone's doing it and you don't want to be left out, do you?