My anti-confrontational nature began at birth. Most kids cry when ripped from the womb. I shrugged. So when, during my first post-college agency job, I was prepping for a face-to-face meeting with a client that, for lack of a more tactful way of stating this, hated my company’s fucking face, I was nervous. My palms were sweaty, my heart was pounding, and I remember feeling as though the entire universe had suddenly snapped back like it had exceeded the limit of its cosmic elasticity and it was now pulling back in on itself with me at the very center, suffering the pressure of billions of years of macrocosmic expansion...you know, normal nerves stuff. But the impending client firing squad paled in comparison to the sudden realization, just before stepping out of my office door, that I had no idea how to tie a tie. And worse, I was in no position to ask for instructions. At that time—a new job, bosses to impress, living on my own—I had committed to a facade of manliness that I had never attempted before. This was new, unnerving territory for me. Failing to tie my own tie would not only chip away at the delicate sports-loving, car-jargon-speaking veneer that I had created, but would likely send me relapsing into a life once again governed by sports-indifference and car-jargon illiteracy. I had worked too hard to risk that.
