Awkward To The Core

I count myself a lucky man. I'm blessed to have the family I have. I have a wife who loves me, kids who love me, and a lot of things in my life are going well. And being the well-adjusted person that I am, I would have said the same thing at any point in my adult life, even my lowest points. I consider myself an optimist. This is not a bragging post, though, so I'll stop there. I just want you to understand a little about the way my mind works so you understand where I'm coming from here. Basically, in a nutshell, what I'm saying is that I know and appreciate how blessed I am. And I recently realized just how blessed I am.

I've started to analyze some of my actions outside the context of my current life. And that made-up psycho-babble just means that I've started to see how weird and sad my life would be if I weren't married with children. And that's mostly because I'm a huge nerd. I love technology as much as Kip Dynamite. I love movie references (like the one in the last sentence) as much as Abed Nadir. And I love TV references (like the one in the last sentence) as much as Family Guy fans. And if I was still single at this point in my life and loved these things, I would be sad.

Disclaimer: I am not implying that single people who like pop culture are sad. I'm just saying that it would be sad for me personally, due to one very dominant personality trait of mine: social awkwardness.

And in case you're thinking, "Taylor is awesome! There's no way he's socially awkward!" here are some examples of things I do all the time:

-I forget what I'm supposed to do with my hands when I'm talking to people.
-I fist-bump when people go for the high-five.
-I fake phone calls to avoid conversations.
-I make eye contact with people way too early when walking in the hallway.
-I trip over nothing and try to make it seem like I was breaking into a jog.
-I wave "back" at people who are waving at someone behind me.
-I laugh and say "yeah" when I didn't catch what someone just said and don't want to say "What?"

So when you pair that social awkwardness with my nerdy habits, I am not a very likely candidate for companionship. So I'd like to publicly (okay, on my blog) thank my wife for looking past all that and choosing me anyway. And I'd like to apologize to my kids for all the horrible things I'm going to put them through as a socially awkward dad. They're gonna hate me.