If awkwardness was made out of strawberries....

....we'd all be drinking a lot of smoothies right now.

‘I just love awkwardness... it fascinates me’ - Peaches Geldolf

‘My life is a series of embarrassing incidents strung together by telling people about those embarrassing incidents’ - Russell Brand

Urban dictionary defines the ‘awkward turtle’ as the mascot of the awkward moment.

But how has awkwardness become adorable, trendy and hilarious? When I feel awkward, I am not endearing, I am not hilarious and most of all, I am not trendy. Awkwardness is that moment when you fail as a human, you malfunction to such an extent that your insides contract and you want to curl in the fetal position and rock back and forth. Does Peaches Geldolf love that feeling? Could she possibly be so sadistic that she enjoys invoking that feeling in others? Perhaps Peaches could be... but surely not all those skinny-jeaned, pointy-shoed indie types who revel in the idea of the cringe-ment (cringe moment).

Here's a googletrend graph of awkwardness. Apparently at the start of 2009... we started loving it.

‘I love awkward moments,’ ‘You know what, I just don’t feel awkwardness,’ ‘ha... look at that awkward girl over there... awkward turtle! *awkward turtle hand motion*.’ These quintessential awkward-related sentences sum up what has become the ‘po-mo-awk,’ the post modern concept of awkwardness.

Perhaps we’ve become detached masochists, removing ourselves from our emotions and finding pleasure in the pain of the cringe. After having a thirty minute conversation with friends about the awkwardness of greeting people (hand shake? go in for the hug? a double kiss? double kiss with a hug on each side? too weird?) I realized the importance of talking about your awkwardness, dispelling the pain by turning it into a moment of po-mo-awk. Sometimes, when I’m in bed and almost asleep, a painful split second memory of an awkward moment will take over my thoughts. I then lie awake, wide eyed and pursed lipped mentally cursing my inability to just be normal. I’ve asked friends what moments sneak into their brains and keep them awake at night. One physically cringes when she remembers her three-year-old self getting into another families car after a picnic, one grits his teeth when he remembers ending his presentation with a ‘ta-daaaaaa’. We talk about these moments and laugh, in fact, these conversations are so hilarious, that i love them. I love awkwardness... Or at least sharing a cringe with other cringers.

This is the turning point; the horrible into the hilarious, the haunting memory into the shared joke, the awk into the po-mo-awk. It’s the feeling of community, knowing that malfunctioning as a human is, in fact, functioning in a totally normal way. You might talk to a blonde stranger next to you in topshop assuming that they’re the similarly blonde friend you came in with, you might sleep with a man and the next time you see him you might have a which-type-of-greeting-panic like none other, or maybe you’ll spend a day with a piece of tissue attached to your nose ring. But none of that matters, because you’ll tell your friends and as they laugh at you, you’ll notice they’ve all got toilet roll stuck to the bottom of their shoes.