I Feel Pluto’s Pain

Remember how I recently said it is very hard to embarrass me? I think I said something about having a thick skin, the result of being dubbed a geek for most of my life. Well, last night my boyfriend proved that it is most definitely possible to embarrass me – and oh boy did he do it in style!

For the last month and a half, I have been looking forward to attending a lecture called “Witness to Demotion: The Rise and Fall of Planet Pluto,” to be given by Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think Dr. Tyson is unbelievably cool – he takes unbelievably complicated astrophysical subjects and makes regular people understand them, and he gets you to laugh while he’s doing it. For one of my Christmas gifts, my mom pre-ordered his new book (The Pluto Files) for me because she knew how badly I wanted to read it. For the record, I think Pluto is awesome, regardless of its planetary status. The lecture, highlighting the book, was announced shortly after Christmas, and I jumped all over it – bought tickets to attend as soon as I could, and I told Nicole about it, too (a fellow Plutophile and Dr. Tyson fan). We have been plotting with each other about how awesome the lecture would be for weeks, and we sat and read the book together as soon as it was released.

A bit of background: Alex does not always see eye to eye with me and Nicole when it comes to the subject of Pluto.

So yesterday arrived. Nicole and I were prepared. Each of us had our books in hand when we arrived at the American Museum of Natural History for the lecture. The lecture was great. At the end Dr. Tyson announced he’d be signing books in the lobby for anyone that was interested. Everyonewas interested, which is a testament to how engaging this guy really is. And so we waited in the line of extreme longness to get our copies of The Pluto Files signed.

It was hot. It was crowded. Alex was a good sport and waited with us. As we got closer to the front of the line, I started to chicken out. This was one of my science idols. I wasn’t sure I could handle interacting with him. So I turned to Alex, handed him my book, and said he might need to hand Dr. Tyson the book for me. He found this bizarre, but took the book. Little did I know, the wheels in his head were whirling around at a dangerous pace.

And so it was that after about a 40 minute wait I arrived at the front of the line with my dear boyfriend and my book to have Dr. Tyson sign the front page. The following is an approximation of the way that interaction went:

Alex: hands book to Dr. Tyson, “That’s for Christina.”

Dr. Tyson: “And where is Christina?”

Me: “That’s me.”

Alex: “Yeah, you’ve got a disbeliever here.”

Dr. Tyson: “A disbeliever?” Looks at me with amusement. “What do you mean?”

Alex: “She’s not sure she believes this whole Pluto thing.”

Me: Speechless with embarrassment, can only open and close my mouth silently. I can feel my body start to overheat.

Dr. Tyson: Looks at me as if I have 14 heads sprouting from my left elbow. “I see… well let me check the page… Ok… and how do you spell Christina?”

Me: Barely able to spell my own name, wanting to crawl away and hide from the shame of Dr. Tyson thinking I am questioning his entire book. I am now sweating profusely, and a little bit wishing I had not asked Alex to hand Dr. Tyson my book.

Alex: “C-h-r-i-s-t-i-n-a”

Dr. Tyson: Signs the book, hands it back, smiling the whole time.

That’s it. Well, it’s not it. Because here is what he wrote:

“To Christina, We can surely agree on page 159. Neil deGrasse Tyson”

Want to know what’s on page 159? A comic from a newspaper in Montreal that contains a drawing of Pluto. The headline reads: “News Item: Now Pluto Is NOT a Planet” and Pluto itself is saying “Like I’m supposed to give a s**t?”

Mortified! Horrified! I’m not sure I can ever go to AMNH again for fear of Dr. Tyson seeing me and remembering I am the girl who thinks he’s full of crap! Alex will probably tell you he was trying to ensure Dr. Tyson interacted with me, and the best way he could think of to have that happen was to create conflict. He and I argue about Pluto’s status all the time – he is not as sentimental towards the now-dwarf as I am. I don’t think he anticipated my level of star-struck muteness when faced with the prospect of actually speaking to Dr. Tyson.

But at least my book got signed…

My Most Humiliating Moment

Welcome to the fourth installment of what Whitney and I are calling ‘collective blogging.’ To refresh everyone’s memory, we will both be writing blog entries on the same topic every Friday as a sort-of exercise to see how different our thought processes and memories are. Hopefully it will be good practice for an idea we have for NaNoWriMo 2009 – to write the same novel, but separately.

This week’s topic: Worst Public Humiliation Moment

I have to say it took a great deal of soul-searching to come up with my worst moment of public humiliation. I feel quite certain that this was not a problem of a lack of humiliating experiences; rather, a lack of resounding memories about them. Because I was such a geek growing up (see last week’s blog for full details) I developed a pretty thick skin about certain things and it now takes a lot to embarrass me to the point where I would remember it forever.

But that was not always the case, and there is one event in particular that I believe was not only my worst moment of public humiliation, but also shaped a big chunk of my personality in social situations.

The year: circa 1985. I was about 4 years old, and we were having a bunch of people over to our house. It was a family gathering – it might have been my brother’s second birthday, or it might have been Easter. I was in a cute little dress, complete with matching tights and hair barrettes. My hair was curled, and I was wearing white patent leather shoes. I was always a bit anal about everything matching and looking “just-so,” and this occasion was no exception. I remember prancing around like I owned the joint at that party because I knew I looked fantastic. My grandmother (my dad’s mom) arrived with her usual odd assortment of gifts for her grandchildren. Sometimes she brought us bags upon bags of sour cream and onion Lays potato chips. This day, though, she brought hideously ugly, brightly-colored plastic sunglasses. They were much too big for any child to wear, and the lenses were a bizarre grey color and popped out of the sunglasses if you so much as touched them.

Being the princess I was at the age of 4, I was less than thrilled when I was presented with my pair of bright red plastic sunglasses with lenses in the shape of hearts. They were awful. I hated them. – - – - As a side note, I do see the irony in my attitude towards these ugly sunglasses at the tender age of 4, knowing as I do now that I was destined to work as an optician for 9 years and develop a true disdain for cheap sunglasses. – - – - Despite my loathing of the heart-shaped horrors, I had some sense of propriety at age 4, and I knew that if my grandma was giving me a present I better use it in front of her. So I put them on and put on a grand show of prancing around in my fancy dress with my fancy shoes and my new sunglasses.

And that is when my whole family started laughing at me.

To be clear, a family gathering in my family at this time did not mean my parents, my brother, and my grandparents. They were there, but they were not the only people there. My aunts and uncles and cousins were there. So were my parents’ second cousins and their kids. So were our next door neighbors and their kids. And not to be left out, my mom’s best friends from college and their spouses and kids were there, too. And they were all laughing at me.

For the life of me I could not figure out WHY they were laughing. I was just dancing around the steps to the basement, singing and wearing my sunglasses. It wasn’t THAT funny. But people were laughing. Laughing hard. That’s when I reached up and felt the sunglasses on my face. The sunglasses I had put on upside down.

That’s right, perfectly put-together 4-year-old me had put her ugly humongous plastic sunglasses on her face upside down, and didn’t realize it, and proceeded to prance around like the queen of everything. My family found this quite humorous, hence the loud and long laughter. They were still laughing when I took off the sunglasses, turned around, and ran up the stairs crying. I was more embarrassed in that moment than I have ever been in my life. I went in my room, closed the door, and would not come out until my mom came in and told me it was OK and no one was going to remember that I had put them on upside down. But I remembered, and from that moment on I refused to be outgoing or silly or anything that would draw attention to myself in groups – because I never wanted to be the center of attention and therefore subject to ridicule ever again.

If you want to read about Whitney’s most humiliating moment, you can read about it on her blog here.