Social awkwardness

As I've blogged before, I'm always extremely awkward in pretty much any social situation. One good example is that I can never really tell if someone is trying to flirt with me or not. My rule of thumb is that someone who is considerably nicer to me than other people around me (like specifically saying "hi" to me alone out of a group of people), and touches me physically, is flirting. But that can't be that accurate—I'm nice to pretty much everyone, even people I can't stand, and I could easily see someone misconstruing my niceness as flirting. (I generally avoid touching people at work, because (1) I'm not as close to people at work as I am to my friends from school, (2) guys don't generally like being touched by guys, and (3) I don't touch girls because I've already gotten an HR warning for sexual harassment once.) If I go by those rules, there is one girl who is definitely flirting with me, a girl who probably is, and two guys who probably are. That would mean that there are as many people attracted to me right now as there have been in my entire life (socially-dysfunctional girl in middle school, mentally disabled girl in high school, and fairly normal girl in college). That doesn't seem right.

If you misread someone's signs at a party (a what?) or at school (well, except when you live in the same building as all of your classmates), there generally aren't going to be any lasting consequences. But, if, for example, I attempt to engage in flirting with some girl on my team, and I fail, it's going to be very awkward once I have to start working with her on a feature. Maybe that's why I don't try. I wonder what it means that the fact that I don't ever try doesn't bother me.