magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

This telephone thing never gets any easier. There's half a dozen or so people, my immediate family mostly, a couple of friends, who I can completely unselfconsciously just pick up the phone and call. With everyone else, no mater the reason that I might have to be calling them, I labour over it. Excessively. Drive myself nuts.

It's not that I have any actual fear of telephones, or even of making and receiving phone calls, it's more a specific manifestation of a more generic social anxiety. And I know that as far as social anxieties go, I'm not really that badly off. I may feel incapacitatingly shy at times, but truthfully, I'm a fairly high-functioning introvert.

The phone thing though, can make the planning of social interaction difficult. Whether it's hosting a party, dinner with friends, or asking someone out on a date. Frustratingly difficult. Especially that last one. And in spite of my nearly 15 years of communicating via email, that, asking someone out, is something that I have a (possibly old-fashioned) notion about, and feel that it's somehow not right (insincere? impersonal?) unless you do it over the phone.

Of course, the whole dating thing still mystifies me in a lot of ways. But the rest of it is all still hypothetical until you've made that phone call. And as I said, so far, this telephone thing has shown no signs of getting any easier.