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December 17, 2004

It's All In The Wrist

We've got a real character working in our shipping department here at work. Good ole Jack. I can easily picture him jumping around chest-bare in the mud at Woodstock 35 years ago. He's a really nice guy. Kinda on the hyper side though. Whenever he blasts through delivering the packages, he calls Rob "My Bohemian Brother!" Cracks me up. Every time. I think he decided I was getting left out, and since I'm a little too 'establishment' to become part of "My Bohemian Brothers", he calls me "My Latino Brother!".

Which is all really just my introduction to the cool-buds knuckle-bonk thing that he does. He came by today to drop off some proofs, and as he handed them to me, he extended the knuckles, and so I whipped out my knuckles, and then right on cue, I completely missed his knuckles. Oh the humiliation. Ladies & gentlemen, I am complete loser when it comes to secret cool-guy handshakes or cool-buds knuckle-bonking. I've always shook people's hands the old fashioned colonial European white-guy way--extend right hand, grasp subjects right hand, firm grip, freestyling comes in the form of how many shakes, or how long the shake lasts. I'm not saying I'm a pro at missionary-style handshaking, but I think I do a good job avoiding the clammy, flacid, fish-hand shake thing, which is about 80% of that game right there.

Whenever I go back to visit Amanda's family and friends back in Oklahoma, I run into a lot of cool-guy secret handshakes. The ones where you start out with standard hand grip, then swiftly shift to the thumb grip, and then over to the curled finger lock, except not ever in the same order, and it always trips me up. It's like oh man, Amanda's husband, what a stiff. Takes me straight back to the doofus loser days of gradeschool and jr. high. (By high school, I had learned to avoid contact with people I didn't know very well, and thus hide my idiocy from the masses as much as possible.) Anyway, baggage. Always there.

Then along came Jack to reinforce to me on a daily basis that I still [don't] got it. Sometimes he does the fist hammer thing instead--where one guy extends a fist for the other guy to bonk his fist down onto, and then the downward bonk is reciprocated by the first guy. It all happens very fast. And at first, I used to get confused as to which one he was after--knuckle-bonk, or fist-hammer--but I started to realize it's all in the angle that the extended fist is at. These things are subtle, people. And I realize that if I was "street wise" as my Aunt Becky used to call it, it would come to me intuitively. Instead, I have to sit here and fret about the mechanics. :P I just need to loosen up and let it flow. I bet I'd get it if I could just do that. And then I wouldn't be missing the target half the time, or getting so focused that I hit his knuckles so hard that they pop. Oh man that was actually pretty funny when that happened. Actually, what I should do is go totally and insanely freestyle and pour on a little confusion myself. Like maybe next time, I'll reach out with my left hand, grab his forearm, and then then do a fast up-down hammer-bonk, followed by a triple knuckle-thonk. See what kind of reaction I get out of that...

Posted by Jeremy at December 17, 2004 8:59 AM