How Embarassing

You’d think that after two decades of practice controlling what comes out of my mouth I’d have learned how to avoid shoving my foot so far down my throat my toes are eroded by stomach acid. Sadly, I’ve done this so many times I’ve lost count. A select few of these occurrences are burned into my memory, like the time in third grade when I was, admittedly, being a nasty show-off and one of my peers called me out on it with an insult that made me feel like a kicked puppy.

Needless to say, I cried. Source.

This recent episode was far worse, however, and has been haunting me for almost a week now.  I won’t go into detail, but some friends and I were teasing our friend (who is black) and, caught up in the laughter, I made a horribly racist comment. Racial stereotypes were fair game, but my comment crossed the line. And not only did I cross the line, I got everyone’s attention and repeated it because nobody heard it the first time. Then there was that terrible silence where everyone knows what’s happened and they’re all waiting for someone else to take control of the situation. It’s that silence that makes me feel the worst. If silences can be described as pregnant, this one was definitely just punched in the stomach. It was like the silence had all the wind knocked out of it, and was utterly empty. The group was all guys, so apart from a low whistle from one kid and “duuuuuude,” from another, my faux-pas was largely ignored, and I think that only exacerbated my resentment. Some part of me feels like it would have been better if they called me out on it and responded like an enraged Joey on Friends did when he discovered Chandler had kissed his girlfriend: 

“You’re so far past the line, you can’t even see the line! The line is a dot to you!”

Source.

I know all of those guys have long forgotten what I said and don’t hold it against me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still feel bad about it, and I’ll keep feeling bad about it until I confront my mistake in some way or another. So, for my own piece of mind, I’d like to apologize for what I said. There was no malicious intent, I’m just a silly girl with no foresight to speak of who, for some reason, really likes the taste of feet.