Pardon Me, But There's a Condom on Your Antenna

For all the declamations and declarations about the crassness and crudeness of modern society (maybe some people are actually reading this blog after all...), I think we're still pretty civilized and polite, as a general rule. Sure, when we're online, hidden behind our clever screennames and our cutesy avatars, we let our collective hair down perhaps a wee bit too much, but, when we've got to face each other one-on-one, I think we're basically all over our P's & Q's, because, when you get down to it, most of us who have lived this long were raised by good mommies and daddies.

And it shows, you little punim, you.

Now, those of you who know me in real life know that this whole Mr. Apron thing is a a pretty shrewd facade. Well, of course, there are some facets of Mr. Apron that I share-- the petulent love of a good obscenity, especially a trusty old pornographic portmanteau-- like "vomcock," the shameless self-deprecations, the, um, limestone-solid vocabulary. The, uh... big...... nose.

You can see it from there, can't you? Don't lie. I don't care.

However, while my mouth may be as big as a toiletbowl on this toilet bowl brush of a blog, in real life it is about as pert and petite as a Lego lady's purse. It takes months of knowing you before I can crack a joke, it takes me a long time to warm up, getting comfortable is very difficult for me, and speaking my mind is almost an impossibility because I am far too busy predicting and inventing and obsessing over all of the ways you are going to judge me.

I'm, you know.... shy.

Guys feel silly calling themselves shy. Shy is for girls. It's for gays. It's for, I don't know... ponies? Puppies? "Oh, she's shy," a middle-aged woman says to a 5-year-old girl after a white poodle shrinks from her proffered hand. 30-year-old men aren't shy. Unless they're really poodles.

But, here I am: shy. As my mother and I are fond of saying: it is what it is.

I started a new job at the end of August, and I've moved from children to psychiatric patients in one fell swoop, which admittedly was a big transition, but I think perhaps an even bigger transition was going from having one coworker, who was also my boss, to having forty-or-so coworkers in a given shift-- and at least four of them at any given time, are my boss(es)/supervisor(s). So, the first month of my employment, I was constantly introducing/being forced to introduce myself to people, sometimes more than once, you know, because nobody remembers a shy poodle the first time they meet her. Introductions for me are painful, because I can smell people sizing me up, and I can smell their judgments. And they can, I'm sure, smell my fear, emanating from my impossibly large pores. I am petrified of saying the wrong thing, or getting tongue-tied, or looking at someone's breasts, or having a booger dangling or an eye twitch or sneezing in someone's face or saying something inappropriate, or racist, or patently inaccurate, like, "Hey, did you know that the world is flat-- just like Pam Anderson's chest?"

For the first little bit of time that I know you, I am painfully, awkwardly, incomparably shy, and careful not to offend, or single myself out, or draw attention to myself with some sort of bizarre comment or statement-- unlike the ones I make here, um, every day. So, imagine my consternation when, in the employee parking lot on Friday, I observed a condom, filled with I don't know what, attached to the antenna of Bob, the maintenance man's, Chevrolet Equinox.

"Oh my God," I said, looking around for, you know, somebody else to see it so they would have to go tell Bob that there was a moog-filled condom tied to his car antenna. Only, there wasn't anybody else around which, of course, meant that I was going to have to go do it myself.

Now, Bob is an older man, maybe in his mid-sixties. He wears hearing aids. Immediately, I started obsessing.

"What am I going to say? He's going to think I'm nuts. Worse-- he's going to think I put it there as some kind of sick practical joke. What if he doesn't hear me right? What if he hears, 'Bob, I've got a condom for your Aunt Fanny.' and he punches me in the face?"

Well, I found Bob cleaning up the activity room on the Acute Unit. I took a deep breath and walked up to him, as calmly as I could. He was mopping the floor, and I tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to face me and I wrinkled up my brow and scrunched up my eyebrows as if I was about to give him news of a freshly deceased kin.

"Um, Bob-- you drive a Chevy Equinox, right?"

"Yes," he said, craning his neck so he could hear the punchline better.

"Well, there's, um, what I believe is a... a... condom, um, filled with-- uh, anyway, it's, it's actually tied to your, um, your antenna."

Pause. I waited for him to hit me in the face. Instead he looked thoughtful for a moment until he replied,

"Humpf. That's the second one this week. Thanks, fella."