Monday, November 20, 2006

I'm just a small town girl...

living in a lonely world really REALLY small (and awesome) town, which has its benefits. I can walk everywhere important: bars, liquor store, mom and pop grocery and the pharmacy. Ok, there are also fabulous restaurants and darling boutiques. I'm quite spoiled living here. There are even street performers, protesters and hipsters on every corner! Who needs New York when you have Northampton, jewel of Western Mass? However, there is a downside to the small town.

Say you suffer a (what you initially consider a rather traumatic) breakup. Say post breakup, you embark on, well, a bit of a (moderate) booty binge. Say you do this in a town of 30,000. One is bound to run into ghosts of drunken nights past. Like today. I'm sitting in a coffee shop and I'm fairly certain I saw a potentially familiar face up at the counter. I pretended like I was in a coma - very believable (especially to those of you acquainted with my tremendous acting abilities). I'm pretty inexperienced at this whole thing and have no idea how a normal adult (heh - adult) conducts oneself in this situation. I'm fine with mutual complete feigned ignorance, but it seems like in such a small town, that's going to eventually become kind of ridiculous. On the other hand, it's not like I'm going to walk up and say, hey, remember that night that time? Yeah, hazy for me too. Nice to see you.

So yeah, I don't know how to act. Any advice out there?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I've been there. Give a terse but friendly hello, as though you never met them. Pretend (or maybe you don't need to) that you don't remember their name. Give them no opportunity to start a conversation. Don't smile or give them any other false impression that you thought it was anything more than a hookup. They'll be in awe of your composure and maturity, and you'll have only needed to utter a single word.