Burning blush

I’m not easily embarrassed. I’m even less easily offended. You can call me names or insult my mother and I won’t bat an eye. Go ahead, try it. I dare you. But actually, wait, this isn’t about not being offended. This is about not being embarrassed. I mean listen, I have been embarrassed, like the time Tina Poulos pantsed me at a dance in 7th grade. I was embarrassed then, as my pegged jeans lay in a pile around my ankles and my baggy cotton underwear billowed for all to see. Mortifying. I was also embarrassed, horribly embarrassed, when in a moment of truly extraordinary weirdness I not only spotted a bottle of Viagra on a grad school professor’s desk but then—and I shudder in horror to recall it now—asked him why he had a bottle of Viagra on his desk. That was really one of the lowest moments of my adult life, though I have taken consolation in the reaction of a good friend: “I mean hell, he’s the one who should be embarrassed.” Right. Right, if only that could make it not have happened in the first place. In any case, in all my lack of embarrassment, I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to blush. I’m fascinated by moments when emotion bursts out of your body—like when panic makes your heart race or palms sweat.

Anyway, today I blushed. It was a deep, full-cheeked blush, the kind you can feel because all the blood races to your visage and it just seems to pool there. It came during a particularly raucous class, a day when I gave them sugar (cookies!) and then told them that there would be no work of unmasking any of our authors as ineffective assimilationists or villainous bourgeois reformers (a recurring theme this semester). I told them that we were going to talk about “feelings,” “understanding,” “solace,” “suffering,” “sympathy.” This was all well and good until I started talking about my own feelings—which I used to do in class with ease—and then WHAM! the blush started to come on and I couldn’t remember what in the world I was saying. Everything got all tangled and it wasn’t scary like panic, but it was totally unfamiliar. It was embarrassment. They all laughed and told me not to be embarrassed, that they actually liked to know my feelings. They said it made me human. I laughed, as if I come off as inhuman or inhumane. Maybe I just come off as nuts.