I have a difficult time recalling embarrassing moments — I like to repress them.

You could say it’s a coping mechanism.

But there are some that are too good to forget.

You know, like the time when you thought you saw someone you knew so you waved. You may even have shouted their name before realizing that you have no idea who the person is.

Or if you’re me, you tell them a story.

In my defense, it was a crowded metro station in Washington, D.C. last spring, and the girl had hair just like my friend Kantele’s.

But that didn’t stop me from having a conversation with a stranger, who I talked to like we were best friends through the metro gates and to the escalator.

But it gets better. Once I actually turned, looked at the girl and realized I didn’t know her, I didn’t stop talking.

“Oh ... I don’t know you,” I remember saying.

And then there was the, “Wow, that’s really awkward.”

Why couldn’t I shut-up? Seriously, as if she already didn’t think I was crazy.

And no, for the life of me, I can’t remember the story I told my new “friend.” I like to think it’s better this way.

As for Kantele, she was walking behind me witnessing the whole scene. Some friend.

— Nanette Light is The Daily’s assistant managing editor and a journalism senior.

Picture yourself, if you will, reading out loud or telling a really great story. Or you could just be talking in general. Your words are flowing right along — after all, you’ve had plenty of years to become accustomed to the English language — when you suddenly slip up. You’re so wrapped up in telling your story that you hardly notice when your audience starts to snicker or even bust out in full laughter.

“What?” you ask.

“Do you know what you just said?” your friends ask as they try to control their laughter.

Ladies and gentlemen, you just made a Freudian slip or “parapaxis.”

A particular instance that comes to mind from my experience is reading from the textbook in my ninth grade biology class and repeatedly saying “orgasm” instead of “organism.”

Oh, you think that’s funny, do you?

Even more recently, here in The Daily’s newsroom, I was recalling a scene from “Top Gun” in which Goose “ejaculates from the plane.”

Yeah, that’s definitely supposed to be “ejected from the plane.”

Don’t worry friends, it happens to the best of us. You get caught up in your story and something, some thought or someone’s comment, interrupts your thought process and is projected into your story, catching you off-guard.

Tips for this situation? Don’t be bothered by distractions when telling a story or reading aloud. Keep your eye on the prize. If you do manage to slip up, just laugh along with everyone else because, hey, it’s funny and not fatal.

The only time a Freudian slip can be potentially fatal is when it involves a significant other. It can be something small, like being at a sushi restaurant during a first date and the topic of favorite foods comes up and you say that the only food you dislike is seafood, or, heaven forbid, the classic saying of someone else’s name while in the middle of ... well, you get the point.

So watch your words before you say (or scream) something like, “I’d like to spank all teachers,” (thank you, George Bush), because that’s just embarassing.

— Amy Frost is the The Daily’s photo editor and a professional writing senior.

It is difficult for me to think of a truly awkward social situation. Not that I am super suave or smooth, believe me, I am anything but. I have simply tried to remove any embarrassments from my memory bank through hard drugs and alcohol.

When I sat down to really think about it, one embarrassing event popped into my head. As simple-minded high school students, my friends and I thought it was hilarious to flip off people for no reason whatsoever, but at my senior prom, this gesture inadvertently offended hundreds of people.

As I rose to receive an award for school spirit, one of my close friends began to gibe me. He was hooting and hollering, and in retaliation I turned around shot both arms straight out and flipped him the double bird. It just so happens a spotlight hit me at that exact moment and more than 300 prom-goers witnessed my extended middle fingers in all their glory.

Instead of bringing my hands immediately to my side, I panicked and kept them up as the crowd began laughing and hollering along with my friends. I walked with my fingers up halfway to the stage before I finally realized what I was doing and put them down.

In the end, most people thought it was hilarious, and so did I, even if it was at my expense. I learned two things from that night: First, everybody does stupid things and second, if you do something stupid in public your friends will never stop reminding you.

— Ellis Goodwin is The Daily’s managing editor and a journalism senior.

Picture yourself as a 13-year-old at a formal awards ceremony. You’re firmly in the awkward stage of adolescence, and you’re already disgusted with the fact that your parents have forced you to accept an absolutely meaningless award.

After almost two hours of boring speeches that have made you contemplate the merits of stabbing a sharp object into your ear, you hear your name called. You’re finally going to get your part of the way.

You make your way on stage, and all you have to do is accept a piece of paper and shake a woman’s hand. Not a difficult process.

But as you approach center stage, a microphone wire complicates things. You feel your foot tugged from under you, and fall flat on your face. If that’s not bad enough, you take the microphone stand with you, creating deafening feedback that forces the backstage crew to turn off the amplifiers for more than a minute.

Yeah, it’s not a pretty picture. Well, it happened to me, and I think it set my development back by about two years.

Falling in general is embarrassing enough, but doing it on such a public stage (literally and figuratively) just makes matters worse. I never lived that moment down.

My friends called me “stage tripper” for the next year. It was a lazy and uncreative nickname, but it still forced me to relive that horrible moment about once a week.

So please, learn from my mistake. If you know you’re going to walk onto a stage, look at the floor and make sure you know where the cords are. Because one of them might just jump up and get you.

— Corey DeMoss is The Daily’s sports editor and a journalism senior.

Falling off your bike and splitting your chin open when you’re nine? Not embarrassing.

Falling off your bike and splitting your chin open when you’re 19? Embarrassing.

Even more so when it happens in the presence of two attractive young men who walked out of Adams just in time to see an idiot riding a bike and talking on her phone totally eat it when she hit a speed bump — not a curb, not a car, not a small dog, a speed bump.

It gets worse as you are forced to stagger around, insisting to these two young men that you are fine, until one of them kindly says, “I think your face is bleeding,” forcing you to admit that you are not, in fact, fine.

The situation deteriorates further as they load your shaky self and your scratched-up bike into their SUV and drive you home, while you bleed on the T-shirt one of them has given you to hold up to your wounded chin.

It hits rock bottom after you arrive home, when you succeed in not passing out (no, really, it was deep) while you put a Band-Aid on and sit down to wait for the friend who will drive you to the hospital to get 20 stitches in your chin. It’s then you realize you cannot for the life of you remember the names of these strangers.

Some sort of bike crash-induced post-traumatic stress disorder has wiped your memory clean, and you will never be able to thank them, or return their bloody T-shirt.

— Meredith Simons is The Daily’s editor-in-chief and an international area studies senior.

I’m a bit of a smart-ass sometimes, and, as a result, also possess the uncanny ability to stick my foot in my mouth in social situations.

A few weeks ago, I was staying at a hotel in downtown Dallas for the OU-Texas football game. It was about 2:30 a.m., and for some reason or another I decided to take a look in the hallway to see what was going down. Surprisingly it was empty, except for one guy, standing alone, watching a girl swipe her keycard and enter her room for the night. It was apparent from the get go that this guy was pretty hammered — his eyes were half-closed and, because of their color and shape, would have made a suitable replacement for Bozo the Clown’s nose if taken out of his head and hollowed out,

My eyes probably looked no better, which was perhaps the reason why I decided I had met this person somewhere before.

“Hey, I think I know you,” I said. “Haven’t I met you before?”

He slowly turned his head and looked at me, wearing the expression that I can only compare to that of a bored cow. Then he tottered over, closer to where I stood in the doorway of my room.

Well, I thought, maybe I know him second-hand. It was possible I’d just seen him around, or maybe he was a friend of a friend or something like that.

Whoever he was, surely he knew someone I knew, right? That was just common probability.

“You probably know J.D.,” I told him, thinking of one of my friends who was also staying in the room.

He didn’t.

J.D., however, hearing the sound of his name, was more than happy to start a conversation of his own with the familiar stranger.

I left the doorway, leaving the two to talk, and walked back into the room, beginning to think now that maybe I really had no idea who the guy in the hallway was after all.

Besides, I thought, I don’t really want to talk to him anyway. Something about the sloppy half-grin plastered on his face gave me the creeps.

I waited until I heard the door to the room shut, then turned to J.D. and said,” Who the f*** was that guy?”

“You mean that guy?” J.D. asked, pointing to the kid, who had somehow entered the room without my knowledge, no doubt at J.D.’s invitation.

“Wow, I must look like a real jackass right now,” I told the kid.

He said nothing, just peered at me from behind his squinted, puffy eyelids. I didn’t bother to say anything else. The kid eventually left, stumbling out the door, where he no doubt resumed his post of standing alone in an empty hotel hallway.

I still have no idea who that kid was.

If you’re reading this, sorry about all that. But, seriously, who the hell are you?

— Adam Kohut is The Daily’s A&E editor and a professional writing senior.

I was in Dallas with an associate from the Daily during OU/TX weekend. We were doing research at the Spaghetti Warehouse. While my associate was waiting in line for our drinks, I decided to sit at an adjacent table, alone.

Sitting alone at a restaurant is awkward. So I pretended I was furiously texting, to the point of even laughing at a pretend joke somebody sent me, in order to throw off those who may give the “who hell is that guy” look. After awhile, the pretend jokes and texts were no longer believable, so I decided I would just concede the table to someone else and investigate the mystery of our missing drinks.

I walked up to my associate, who was facing the bar, and decided to ask her what was going on. I placed my hand on her shoulder in a friendly, “hey dude!” kind of way, and said “hey, what the hell is up with the wait?”

The woman who turned around to face me was, to my surprise, not my associate at all, but rather a wide-eyed, aghast looking woman in a similar color shirt.

“Who the heck are you?” she asked.

At this point I weighed my options. I was already the creepy guy sitting alone for ten minutes. Now I was the shoulder-grabbing weirdo who yelled at strangers. Instead of explaining myself, I decided it would be the best idea to leave the situation immediately.

I managed to awkwardly stammer, “uh, whoops,” before I turned and bee-lined in Michael Cera fashion toward the opposite end of the bar.

The drinks were no longer important at that point, and I will never visit the Spaghetti Warehouse again.

I’m the king of awkward, and I win.

— Tyler Branson is a Daily staff writer and an English and history senior.