The How to Guide For the Socially Awkward Part 4

           We all enjoy the exciting feeling that travelling brings right? Well some of us do, sometimes when you look back on your relaxing holiday you quietly reminisce about laying on a beach or that couple who were your holiday pals. If you really stop and think though. It wasn't all that relaxing was it.

            If you are lucky enough to have found a holiday that hasn't required the remortgage of your house and the sale of your least favourite child, you eventually find yourselves ready to take flight. Now initially you will have passport panic about 50 times on the way to the airport and you've had the taxi driver reassuring you that not all planes crash, you will eventually be checked in and awaiting take off. The flight can be a traumatic experience for some. for example, smokers and people who get hungry but have left their wallet in their case. You then become the most irritating other half on the planet. I myself have found that I have moaned for 4 hours on a flight that I am hungry, so much so the person in front gave me a sandwich to shut me up and for those adventurous flyers out there who think it's a good idea to join the mile high club! Why on earth would you do this? You are 'doing it" in one of the most confined used toilet cubicles on earth. I mean have you seen Slumdog Millionaire? Those toilets are more hygienic!  

         So you are lucky enough to have landed safely and providing you haven't flown with monarch, you probably have your luggage too. You are in new uncomfortably hot county where nobody understands a word you are saying. So you now adopt the local dialect, this being English but said.........very............very............slowly. My dad once asked me to order him a coffee when we were away in Rome. so I put on a really bad super Mario style Italian voice and asked.

"Heya, Escuse... you giva me da cafe eh?"

turns out the barista was fully fluent in English and just thought I was a head mental child. She even gave me free Biscotti. You also as an adult maybe faced with my problem. Now I absolutely do not have a body to be seen topless, yet my girlfriend is one of those head turners. So I just kind of sit around in a t-shirt and shorts afraid of the beachy judgement.

         Whilst in a new country every day poses new challenge, The food being one i mean go to Poland look at a menu and think I will try the local cuisine. Once I thought I was getting experimental and ordered 'Kurtka sera ziemniaków i fasoli' when a cheese and bean jacket potato arrived I was pretty disappointed to say the least. 

Then you are struck with the thought of maybe I should embrace a little of the local culture. This in many places is an amateur mistake!

Once I was in Morocco and went into a shop to buy a fez, Do not judge I was young! Also I have a good egg shaped head which suits the shape of a fez. My first mistake was trying it on. I was forced to buy this fez as apparently in some places in Morocco, If you try, you buy. If you don't by I hold you hostage until you do buy. I'll be honest, I brought it. This is all part of the holiday experience which in my view is the least relaxing thing to do. Just go to Devon! It's the riviera of England and everybody kind of understand what you are saying.

      

Maybe Inappropriate but...

              I have always had a strange relationship with people, I think that it's things like, I refer to other people as humans whilst talking to them, which is apparently is a rather odd thing to do and also I have a tendency to say things to certain people and fail to notice that their reaction is that of a person that has just witnessed a cult burning a witch for the first time. I am told on a regular basis that I have no filter. Unfortunately this I can't argue with, but I do choice to rub icing on that description and usually state.
"I am just saying what everybody else is thinking."
knowing that quite possibly nobody at all is thinking anything of the sorts, and what actually happened was that the voice in my head shouts at me.
"Make a holocaust joke!"
My mouth instantly regurgitates the most inappropriate arrangement of words you could possibly imagine. My mind seems to have some sort of trolling vendetta and refuses to hide it in any way.

            If you can think of absolutely anything you shouldn't say whilst in a relationship, I can personally guarantee that I have said it. When asked the question do I look nice, Generally rule one is there is only one answer, that answer i should always be yes. My thought process says yes, my logic says yes, my interfering nonsensical unfiltered mind chose to send the following signal to mouth.
"No, you look a bit like a rugby player in a dress"
Not a good answer! I once worked in a restaurant in Birmingham, Now firstly let us get one thing straight. TV chefs and the shouting. It's all very dramatic, my kitchen was a very fun place and you would usually find me dancing like a moron to Footloose by Kenny Loggins! any way as usual I digress. We had a new waitress start as part of our Christmas recruitment. A German girl, very quiet, very timid, very pompous and cantankerous also to a young chef with a warped sense of humour very easy to maybe play a joke or two on.

          After her third day, I hadn't spoken to her at this point. I was planning on playing a small joke on her maybe with a rat in the bin yard and she would scream blah blah, you get the picture. For some reason thought engine came straight into practice the moment she went to introduce herself. I turned and shunned her smiling with my back to her. I walked out the back and explained my plan to the head chef, who incidentally thought it was as brilliant as I did.

The next day the waitress approached the head chef and asked him if she had offended me in any way. This is what we agreed he would tell her and did.
"It's nothing you personally have done, It's more everything your kinsman. You see Rob is Jewish and you are the only German he has ever met. So naturally he blames you for the death of his grandparent"
This woman was so gullible, I mean she tried to make so much effort to communicate for a week and I just got further into pretending to be a Jew. I even brought a Kippah (a Jewish skull cap) from ebay and started wearing it whilst referring to people as buby at every opportunity. I must say after a week I did tell her it was a joke and we became very good friends and she is aware that this is being written.

People for reasons as mentioned generally see me as Marmite personified. I mean as a younger person my filter-less mind was seen as cute in some respects, apart from the time I appeared on a childrens TV show in 1995 on BBC one called why did the chicken? and decided to embrace my moment in the spotlight apparently that was not so cute, also what did that 9 year old child just say on television?

Five steps to trouble

Ok so as you can imagine I am not exactly a tongue swizzling charmer with the opposite sex. Saying that I have learnt my fair share and I have also made my fair share of wrong thing said at the wrong moment times. These are my top five life lessons of what definitely not to do.

1) Ok, number one is one that some young men out there will have only had slightly wrong dreams about doing but I implore you do not! Stop! Do not under any circumstance get inebriated with a friends mom whilst waiting for him to come back from college, notice that his mom is quite attractive and then proceed to make very slow, old and disgusting love to her. THIS DOES NOT GO DOWN WELL. consequently I was caught with my friends mother during the act of what could be defined as beautiful, but in this case I won't describe it that way. After being chased into his back garden I was hit in the face with a shovel and left with a broken nose and ego. I suppose I should count myself lucky that nothing was removed from my person whilst on the floor. Just do not go there. that friend is no longer a friend and I believe he still wants me dead.  A little dramatic if you ask me.

2) Under no circumstance take any drugs and carry a mobile phone. As previous readers have discovered in my younger years I experimented with narcotics and carrying a mobile phone only leads to trouble. The only other time I was arrested but never prosecuted if i may add was the time I had taken some lethal cocktail and incidentally I rang the police to report my camel had been stolen. They later removed me from the local railway station whilst scream.
"Have no fear Thomas the tank engine, I've stolen the fat controllers hat so he won't be in tomorrow"

3) Number three is an obvious one but I believe it destroyed my first relationship. Absolutely under no circumstance compare your relationship to Auschwitz! I went on to say that I saw her as "The Hitler" figure and I was being wrongly punished for things I hadn't done. Looking back had I used a better analogy it may not have caused the faecal storm that ensued. Ironically I am sure she used to leave the oven on, on purpose after that.

4) So growing up we all used to play games, a favourite of mine as a child was knock door run. For those of you who do not know what that is. It's where you taunt a local neighbour by knocking their door and running. My favourite victim was the man at number 87. He was mental, and I'm not talking a little crazy. This man used to carry a goldfish bowl with him everywhere he went and hoover his lawn! He was also 6' 4" and the size of a well built tractor. We used to knock and run every day for months until one day we upped the anti. We decided to cover his door entrance from top to bottom in strips of tape before we knocked, it was perfect. The moment finally came for the big knock he ran out as if he was waiting for us. Straight into the tape. He was insanely furious and this was by far the funniest thing I had ever seen. I was laughing so hard I forgot to start running by the time I realised I had to run it was almost too late. I turned and fell straight over a brick onto a piece of metal on the floor. I was in pain, covered in blood and quite frankly thought Mr 87 was going to feed me to his wife. Luckily he didn't he took me home where I had to go to the hospital with an angry father and have 4 stitches. lesson the nutty ones may provide the best laughs but also the most stitches.

5) Finally, to complete the list. If you do not want to annoy your parents and you are a creative 7 year old then I suggest you express your artistic nature in a drawing book of sorts. My parents had recently decorated my room in a full Teenage mutant ninja turtles theme. I was pretty much over the moon apart from the wall colour, it was a shade of blue only a sailor could like so I decided I would redecorate. I was faced with one small problem I didn't have access to paint. I waited until I heard my parents go to bed and thought (for some reason) this will surprise them! I will redecorate myself. They were more 'The angriest middle aged couple I had ever seen in my entire life' than surprised when they came to get me the next morning only to find that I had coloured in my bedroom wall (not walls) from corner to corner in crayola red. Yep I had stayed up all night and worn my complete red collection of Crayola Crayons down to the pure paper. I was told later that day that Santa was going to bring me nothing that year (my step mom) and my dad told me that the ghosts were going to watch me in my sleep if I didn't start behaving. I will be honest, I was more frightened of my dad's consequences rather than no presents 11 months later.