What are you gonna do?

Has it ever happened with you that at times you find yourself stuck in awkward situations and you must find something to do? (Well you may not find situations so awkward the way I do but still!) Lets take a simple example. You agree to meet a friend at a cafe. Your friend is already at the cafe and you make eye contact with him from a distance. You wave to acknowledge the aforementioned eye contact. It is this distance that I need to travel that kills me. What does one do while covering this distance? You can't obviously keep making eye contact. That will just freak him/her out (What you don't think the person I am meeting can be a 'her'?) You can't always look away because its not polite. There are a number of things that you can do actually. I usually use my cellphone as an object that has me occupied. I pretend as if I have just received an important message which I must attend to. In fact I have seen a lot of people do the same thing. Another one of my tricks is to pretend as if I just tripped over an imaginary stone and must watch the ground closely to avoid any future such clumsiness. (What? I am sure you have your own tricks). If I am the one sitting in the cafe and have spotted my friend then I have a neat trick that I am proud of. I'll just pretend that I haven't seen him. I'll just keep looking randomly at people or places and acknowledge the person only when hes inches away. Oh! When did you come?? (I must tell you that I have run into a lot of problems when I randomly 'pretend' (totally intentional) to 'observe' (checkout) 'people' (girls) when I am waiting for that 'her' friend that I was talking about).

The worst is when the friend you are with runs into her long lost friend and it is imperative that she must catch up with this friend at that very moment. Ofcourse she introduces you but then what? You can't speak because there is nothing to say really. You just have to listen to their tales of how they tried contacting each other and smile in an understanding and i-am-totally-interested way. A phone call at that time is God sent. Even if its one of those bloody customer care executives you'll listen to them patiently as if you were getting paid for this.

There is another situation which somehow happens a lot to me. So by now you must have realized how conscious a person I am. You must also know that I am very shy. I have what you call stage-fright. And the world is a stage. So I kind of rehearse my lines a lot especially when other people are speaking their lines-in real life. So when my friend introduces me to her friends and I must introduce myself at the end this is how it goes:

Friend 1: Hey, Ravi* (Me: I am Gautam)
Friend 2: Hi, I am Siddharth* (Me: I am Gautam)
Me: I am Gautam (No clue what either Friend 1 or Friend 2 said)

*Real names not disclosed (Don't know the real names)

And sure enough a time comes when you must repeat these names. What are you gonna do?