Meeting New Friends

So as promised in my earlier post, I have moved to a new house... with the INTERNET, hooray!

As with moving to a new place comes starting a new life and making new friends. It’s seriously the pits! Don’t get me wrong I am totally excited to have new friends, just not to excited about the weeks ahead of sitting by myself and being totally awkward in trying to meet new people. The whole time I’m meeting new people and going to activities by myself, I’m thinking, “Okay be confident… so sit with those people they look nice…okay I can’t do it, I’ll sit here alone and hope someone sits by me.” Does anyone else do this but me? So here’s a story from my first weeks in my new place.

So I went to church for the first time… alone. I managed alright but definitely not my favorite day of my whole life. It was followed by going to the fireside…alone. At least I saw one friend there. But the following day we had a BBQ for family home evening and I decided I would be brave and once again go alone and venture out to start making friends.

After family home evening I reflected at the sheer awkwardness of meeting new people. One girl that I got to be sort of friends with actually told me that she, “Usually just likes to meet people to go on dates, but meeting other girls is okay sometimes.” Basically telling me she liked me, but would like me better if I was a boy and took her on a date. Awesome.

The awkward of other people can only take us so far though, the true gem is that of my own awkwardness. So now that I’m out of school and only working that’s really the only opening of conversation people can ask me about. The conversation usually goes something like this:
“Just working? Oh, so what do you do?”
“I’m a software engineer… “ (and because no one really knows what that entails)… “I write computer programs.”
Then one of the following statements:
“Whoa, I never would have guessed that! You don’t look like a computer nerd.” (This I take as a compliment but what they are really saying is, “You’re not a boy.”)

“So how do you actually WRITE a computer program?”

“Oh.” (That usually ends the conversation. They have decided that I am not going to be a fun person to start chatting with and they are best to end the conversation before getting locked in.)

If they are super polite and ask more about my job, the conversation does not end well. Either they get so bored when I am explaining it that their eyes glaze over or at the end, since they weren’t really listening they politely say, “I have no idea what you just said.” Followed by a nice smile and change of subject or an extreme interest in something across the room.

This all started last Thanksgiving with my own family. A few people asked me about my new job and in my excitement for working for a company that wrote software that saves soldiers lives I was all too eager to tell them about it. Well after the first few long descriptions of what I did, people stopped asking. I think behind my back they were spreading the word… “Whatever you do DON’T ask Molly about her job!” With my mom being the primary instigator.

But I have since learned to be aware of my boringness to others and try to avoid the subject of my job usually. But tonight, it caught me off guard. One girl asked me what I did and then responded that today she had to Google to figure out how many kilobytes were in a megabyte. So I asked her what she found out. She replied, “1,024” “Yep, Great Job” I said. Then the table conversation turned to how weird it was that it was that number. Isn’t it kind of random? Yeah, so weird. Why isn’t it just like 1000? Well they were asking questions and my mind was going and the words just started coming out. I couldn’t stop them. I started to explain that computers run on bits which can only be 1s and 0s and therefore the bits had to be in powers of 2 so it doesn’t work out to be exactly 1000…on and on…When I was about half way through there was a voice in my mind, trying to harness all the social skills I had to stop myself. STOP! Stop right now, that’s enough. Bits and bytes? Why are you talking about this? This will earn you -5 cool points! But I couldn’t stop in the middle of my explanation. I just continued as I looked at the 4 pairs of clueless eyes staring back at me wondering what planet this girl had come from. All the while continuing to explain and ignoring the voice in my mind that was blaring like a siren alerting the death of my future social life in this ward.

Classic Molly moment, figuring more talking will somehow work my way out of the awkwardness I have created… instead it deepens it. So for all of you nerds out there, who make jokes about atmospheric pressure (no joke, I did it without even thinking just 2 days ago), I have posted my nerd score. I’m happy to report myself as a “high-nerd.” Feel free to take the nerd quiz if you’d like!