For most of my life, I’ve had a problem with sticking my foot in my mouth. I’ve gotten better about this over the years, as I seem to get more and more introverted every year, but it still happens too often for my comfort.
I’m happy to report that I still haven’t topped the absolute worst instance of this, which happened about 25 years ago when I was a teenager. My mom and stepdad had gone out of town for the weekend and I had the house to myself so, naturally, I threw a party. It wasn’t a big bash, more of a small gathering of about ten friends. We had beer and pot, but no one was really wasted. It was pretty mellow.
I knew everyone there pretty well. There were three girls besides me, and they were all my closest friends, and there were four or five guys, and they were all pretty close to our group except for one guy. He was casual friends with the guys, but none of us girls had ever met him. I’ll call him Mark, but I honestly don’t remember his name.
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The assumption was that everyone would stay at my place for the night; it wasn’t unusual for all of us to spend the night together, but Mark, probably because he wasn’t as close to all of us as we were, decided he was going to call it a night and go home as the party winded down.
The guys didn’t think he should, given he’d smoked a considerable amount of weed and had a few beers. So they told him to just stay, and I let him know he could crash alone in my brother’s room so he wouldn’t have to share a bed or blanket with anyone.
He said no, he wanted to go home. We reminded him that we were really close to a police station and there were always patrol cars on the main road off my neighborhood. He said he’d risk it, he wanted to go home.
One of the guys tells him “Dude, just stay. I’ll load another bowl and I’ll have my brother bring us more beer.”
Mark takes off his coat and says “Oh, okay, that sounds good. I’ll stay.”
So I said “Wow, bend that rubber arm!”
My girlfriends laughed, but the guyfriends gasped and went silent.
Mark stood up and put his coat back on. “What did you just say to me?”
I laughed and said, “ it’s a joke, you know? You bend someone’s arm to make them do something, but it was really easy to-”
“Yeah. It was really easy to bend MY rubber arm, wasn’t it? That’s funny to you?”
I was stoned and very confused. I looked at the guys and they were still stunned silent. “What is going on?” I asked.
Mark stormed out of the room, and at that point all the guys told me how much I fucked up.
In the next cringe-inducing and mortifying moment I learned that Mark had a prosthetic arm and he not only went to great lengths to hide it, but was very insecure about it. I chased him down the hall and outside and apologized profusely, probably making everything worse with everything I said, and he basically told me to do things that would make Anthony Scaramucci blush.
THAT was the worst. But the most recent* is this:
The other night Mrs. BB and I were talking about going to a movie soon, then we trailed off into another conversation and then both checked our phones for whatever reason. In my mind I went back to the movie conversation because A Wrinkle in Time was one of my favorite books as a kid and I wanted to see if the movie was playing near us soon. I meant to ask Mrs. BB if she had ever read it, then remembered that she has never been a big reader so assumed she probably hadn’t, but wanted to make sure.
And so I go to ask her all of that, but somehow it comes out (seemingly out of the blue from her perspective) “You didn’t read much as a child, did you?”
As soon as I saw the look on her face I realized what I had done. She gave me a “wow, really?” and then, fortunately, busted up laughing. I felt terrible about it, but we both decided it’s one of the best insults I’ve ever come up with, and we’ll both use it again in the future.
*I told this story in a comment a couple days ago, the morning after it happened, and I apologize for recycled material but…. shrug. Sorry if you’ve heard this one before. :)
Now, on to Tops:
Top Comments:
From brillig:
I'm sure to be going to Hell for this, but I had to submit cbiron11's explanation for Hunter's Shots fired in Georgia high school; teacher taken into custody. Bonus points for the not one but FOUR people who replied identically within a several minute span. Great minds and all that :).
[Ed note: brillig, if you go to hell for that you’ll be in great company!]
From i saw an old tree today:
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