Socially Inept

I find myself acting stupidly around boys. Sometimes I get flustered when guys I don't know talk to me and I don't know how to respond. Not because I like them. It's actually quite the opposite problem. DC doesn't just happen to be our nation's capital, it is also allegedly one of the nation's singles capitals. Yet this factoid is completely wasted on me, as I am in a more than wonderful relationship.

So I am in an interesting position in my day to day life. It doesn't happen all that often, but occassionally when I'm riding the bus, out with my friends at a bar, or riding the elevator up to my class, a guy will strike up conversation with me. I've never been good at telling whether a person's just being nice or trying to hit on me so I don't know how to act accordingly. Basically I don't want to be the cold person if he's just trying to be nice and I don't want to be the cold person leading him on (I think this semi-irrational fear stems from an odd occurence when a guy in one of my classes at UCLA thought that we were in a relationship when I would just be nice and talk to him; traumatizing really).

Irrational fears aside, I do partly think that we have this societal distrust of people just talking to us, especially people of the opposite sex. Maybe our generation went a little overboard with the whole not talking to strangers thing to the point where we developed this subconscious notion that anyone who talks to us immediately wants something and/or is bad. I'll say hi or give the head nod to people in my apartment elevator but I sure know that I don't really acknowledge someone walking by me on the street.

And as an iPod owner myself, I just wonder how much worse this culture of isolation is going to get with white little earbuds always in our ears.