Embarrassment

Like everyone else, I’ve experienced my fair share of embarrassing situations, but none more bizarre than last week’s. I was at Coastal Village for a friend’s birthday barbecue, and towards the tail end of the party (midnight-ish), those of us who remained were on the lawn downstairs, shooting the excrement, smoking lots of cigarettes, and passing a bottle of wine around. I hardly ever drink, but I didn’t want to be my usual “Mr. Puritan Teetotaler” boring self, so I took pulls whenever the bottle made its way to me. I have no clue whether the wine was good or of MD 20/20 quality – what’s important is that for some ungodly reason, it was in a paper bag. So I’m sitting in the middle of a public, highly trafficked area of the university’s student housing, drinking, talking loudly (and, at times, rudely) and smoking like a fiend, when a group of students walked past. Thanks to my customarily shitty luck, one of the students was a member of last semester’s Marine Systems class. And so, in one fell swoop, I went from being nice, polite “Professor Jorge” to being “Hobo Jorge,” who drinks booze out of a paper bag, smokes, and drops f-bombs while cackling like a demented street tramp. This is what I get for conforming!