It’s ironic that Jane Buckingham’s newest book is all about sticky situations, from what to do if you find out your best friend’s husband is cheating on her, to dealing with an over-salted stew. But as Buckingham put the book to bed, she discovered that there were some issues neither practicality nor wit could fix: a dear friend of hers had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Her solution for this stickiest of situations: she is donating proceeds from the book to her friend’s family.
To enter to win a copy of The Modern Girl’s Guide to Sticky Situations, leave a comment detailing the stickiest situation you’ve ever been in. One lucky entrant will win the book, or it’s available for purchase at Amazon.
The Modern Girl’s Guide to Sticky Situations book giveaway
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Copy & paste this:
My stickiest situation was breaking up with my then-boyfriend, when he and I had an upcoming out-of-state trip in which I paid a large deposit to secure my spot. It was a two-week trip, and I already had the time off from work, so finding someone to go in my place at the last minute would be impossible. I did what I could to enjoy the trip as much as possible, and ended up breaking up the day before heading back. It made for a quiet ride home, which was better than two weeks of misery or two weeks of lost wages. It was the best decision, I believe.
My best friend’s boyfriend told her that they weren’t going to Senior Prom. So when her friend asked her to go, she said yes. After telling her boyfriend that she was asked, he told her that he just bought them tickets for it. Like the best friend I am, I offered to go with her boyfriend so he could still go, and be able to dance with his girlfriend. My boyfriend, however, doesn’t really like that. Do I go, and upset my boyfriend? Or do I stay home and leave my best friend out to dry?
Time to join a monestary!
Your best friend needs a better boyfriend.
Actually…. both need better boyfriends…..
However, a boyfriend is always temporary… friends are forever
My best friend’s husband is in love with me! And now basically I can’t see either of them!
The stickiest situation I’ve ever been in was when my best friend found out that her husband was cheating on her and had been for the 4 years of their marriage. Oh, and did I mention that she was 5 months pregnant when she found out? Oh, did I also mention that her husband had been deployed to Afghanistan 3 weeks prior to her finding this out? Or that her husband had been telling his mistress that when he came home he’d be leaving his wife and moving out of state to live with her?? Yeah, that was a fun day.
I was lost in Naples, Italy and almost no one could speak enough English to help me get back to Rome…except the man without teeth who wanted a kiss from me in exchange for his trouble.
One of the stickiest situations was when me and my friend attended a party. we didn’t know the host that well. Well me and her decided to go to the bathroom together, as girls often do. I Always tell her that she uses too much toilet paper, and guess what happened this time, she used enough to totally clog the toilet. There we stood, toilet full to the rim with water and people knocking on the door (of course everyone wanted to use the only bathroom at that time) She couldn’t stop laughing and we both decided that there was no way we were going out of that bathroom if the toilet was not working properly. We tried everything. At some point i Thought it was a perfect idea to take the wrong end of the broom and try to push all the paper through, which worked! But we did get a few looks on our way out of the bathroom, after all it did take is 40 min to solve the problem.
My married boyfriend thought I was having an affair with my married Karate instruction so he got his cell phone number illegally and wrote him a threatening text message or two. My Karate instructor was also a cop. Whoops!
Maybe you should date single guys…
obviously.
Stickiest Situation: Well, how about this one. In my wilder days (I’ve been domesticated by a nice young man) I found myself in quite a sticky situation. I went on a date with, lets call him, Tom. Tom and I hit it off, we went out drinking, and one poor decision led to another. Tom and I made our way back to his place; his roommate, lets call him, Jack, Jack was at home. Stumbling in, I introduce myself and make my way to the bathroom for the obligatory “powdering of my nose.” Tom goes into his room to await my drunken grand entrance, and as I emerge, freshly powdered, I find Jack standing in the nearby kitchen. He was polite, pleasant and friendly. Time felt like it was slipping away and poor old Tom was still in his room. I made a move past Jack and you got it – he brushed my side, i grabbed his arm, and boom – we kiss.
I realize this is not a story for those ruled by any sort of moral compass, but I can only interject – hey, I had a good time and I was safe, so who the hell cares – anyway, it got pretty heated pretty quick. I hear the door creak from across the way, and I hurriedly slip out of Jack’s hands and into Tom’s waiting arms.
Not too bad right? Well, upon entering Tom’s room and thinking I’m home free – we hear a knock at the door. Of course its Jack, and he blatantly just says it – right then and there. “I kissed your girl, man.”
Drunken and dumbfounded, I stand, awaiting my cue to hightail it out of there.
Well, as I stood up to defend myself and calm the masses; I think to myself. What is one thing I have always fantasized about? Threesome. With two dudes. Now, this may not be your cup of tea, but its mine. So..with some very deft maneuvering and some, ahem, oral/verbal reassurance for Tom (he was feeling a bit dejected at first)…my sticky situation became…well. it was sticky, but definitely not a situation.
My stickiest situation…I can not keep friends that are guys and friends with my fiance.I have had two of them come after me.Including a scary time when one of them came over while my fiance was at work.I had to call my fiance when his friend was at the door yelling at me to let him in.He went away when he heard me on the phone but i had to calm my fiance down who was ready to go after him.Since then my fiance refuses to see any of his guys friends and does not like me to be friends with guys.
Right… so my MIL is dying of terminal cancer and my FIL asked me to take his profile picture for a dating website. I tell him he needs to wait (that makes it seem so succinct). So she dies… we do the funeral bit on a Wednesday. We go to church on Sunday and while still in his suit, he asks me to please take his profile picture now as he has waited.
Hello,
The stickiest situation i have been in was with an ex boyfriend. He proposed and i of course said yes and was so excited even tho we had gone through rough year. Well he took it upon himself to let me know he had cheated, lied and stole from me, but of course left out some important information that was obtained from another person close to both of us. So my world was upside down i was thinking should i marry him he said he changed and wanted to get all the bad memories off his chest.. or was i to break it off because if someone would lie,cheat and steal its not getting much better. Well now we make it to the end of my story and the decision i came to was to break it off. To this day i dont regret it cause with in a week of me breaking it off he was engaged to a girl he had just met.
Well for me this story ends well, I found an amazing boyfriend and he recently proposed!! I have to say the best things come in time together.
I was unfortunately a firsthand witness to my at-the-time best friend cheating on her boyfriend (now husband). He was in Iraq at the time, and after a drunken night she made some poor decisions and decided to bang a friend of hers while I was in the bed next to hers in a hotel room.
It became more awkward when she thought trying to carry on a conversation with me mid-bone would prevent me from noticing what she was up to. Things worsened when they decided to finish up in the bathroom, with its tiled-walls echo.
The next morning her first words were “Let’s pretend that never happened.”
She moved her wedding date to when I was travelling abroad, which is convenient, because the moral part of me would have had a difficult time keeping my mouth shut during the “Should anyone have any reason that these two should not wed, speak now or forever hold your peace” portion of the ceremony.
We don’t talk anymore.
My stickiest situation was about a year ago. I had this guy friend that I had known since high school and he got married to this girl I had never known till they got together but her and I became good friends. Almost a year into their marriage she started pulling away from me and appeared to dislike me (or so it seemed) and he started contacting me more telling me how miserable he was and crying about how she told him she no longer loved him. I believed him because he was one of my besties and he seemed genuinely upset. Then he started hitting on me, trying to get me to kiss him, telling me how he had always liked me and never stopped and how he wished I was the one he was with. That’s the point where I backed out of the situation and told him that as long as he was married there would never be anything between us because I wasn’t that kind of girl and also that the way he was acting made me distrustful of him and everything he’d been saying. Later his wife left him and got back in touch with me and I found out that he’d been lying to me alot, cheating on her with another girl (she woke up and they were being intimate in the bed beside her) and that he tried to hit her (she took karate for years so that didn’t work so well for him). I cut off all contact with him and renewed my friendship with her…also finding out that the reason she pulled away from me is because he was telling her all kinds of horrible things about me and how much he hated me. And her story was confirmed by several of his best friends who are now no longer friends with him.
Stickiest…I’m going to go with when one of my friends told me that he was in love with me, even though he knew full well that I was (and still am) in a committed relationship. I (admittedly) had a slight crush on him, but was saying nothing because I don’t want to leave my boyfriend. But him saying that he loved me made things a hundred times more complicated. We tried to figure out if there was a way we could make it work without cheating; we even went through a period when he was asking my boyfriend if we could have an open relationship between the three of us.
Now, we’re still friends even without the relationship, and it still is very sticky at times because he still openly wants us to be together, but the situation is improved.
My stickiest situation had to do with my grandmother. She was an addict to something or other for most of her life. For this particular situation she had gotten in the habit of going to bed with a couple of bottles of wine and no food. At the end of these binges she would be discovered by my mother or her home healthcare worker.
My grandmother always denied ever drinking more than a glass a night. I knew that was bullshit since I was ten. So this time at the hospital I was listening to her tell the doctor her typical lies. I was so angry. But I was only about 20. What right did I have to tell the doctor what she was doing? Finally I got angry enough that I just blurted, “Doctor, I think you should know that my grandmother is an alcholic and some of her mysterious symptoms likely have to do with alcohol withdrawl.”
The look I got from my grandmother could have frozen hell over. Though I do think my mother wanted to cheer. Eventually I was forgiven, as I was one of the youngest grandchildren. But it was tense for quite a while afterwards.
A married couple came over to my house, longtime friends, for dinner on our typical “everybody come over and hang out” night. Right after they arrived, Couple B shows up at my back door unannounced: the jilted ex of Couple A’s female half and his new bride, just moved back to town. These couples have refused to speak to each other for over a year, and those friendships are over. When they insisted on coming in, I stalled the new arrivals in the kitchen and went to the living room. Upon quietly informing Couple A of the surprise guests, Couple A’s lady panicked and ran out the front door, with her husband stumbling after her. I went back to the kitchen and had to let Couple B know that Couple A was gone. The new bride was horrified and insulted. I tried my best to make everyone feel welcome and comfortable, and I’m still trying to be neutral ground as best I can.
I was once engaged in a heated ninja battle with the evil master Lao-Tsen when suddenly a horde of zombies turned the corner into our darkened alley. Lao-Tsen and I both knew that to continue our battle meant certain zombification, but I could see in his eyes that it was death to me or death to us both. Without a second thought I drew my dagger and sliced the palm of my own hand, then flung blood at Lao-Tsen’s face. Temporarily blinded, he staggered back as the zombie horde lurched ravenously toward us. I used the split second to leap onto a dumpster and climb a fire escape to safety. But just as I heaved myself onto the roof, Batman appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. I knew he had never forgiven me for discovering his secret identity during our one night of passion, and that he considered me a liability because I never called (I just didn’t know how to tell him that despite his looks, physique and financial standing, he was a dud in bed). He grabbed me by the arm, and for a brief moment I thought he might dispatch me once and for all. But instead, he pulled me in for a passionate but poorly executed kiss. I pushed him gently away and told him, “Look, Batman, this can never be. I’m a ninja, and you’re a deranged vigilante. We can never have something to lose.” He looked across the city toward the bioweapons research facility in the middle of town. “You’re right, Black Shadow,” he said. “Our city needs us more than we could ever need each other. Just know that when Gotham is whole again, I will come find you.” With that, he leaped to the next building, and I disappeared into the night, trying to ignore the screams of Lao-Tsen being devoured by the zombies below.
It was a sticky situation, that’s for sure.
This entry should win the contest.
This one should win the contest.
Totally Epic. XD
I caught my husband of ten years cheating on me a while ago and I left. We attempted to be friendly to each other for the first year or so, and I continued to assist him in throwing cocktail parties, dinner parties, etc. for his company (as this had always been fun for me before the divorce). I knew his bosses/co-workers/clients quite well. I arrived one night to set up and found that his boss had arrived early (a common occurrance for that man) and was talking to my ex-husband about my ex-husband’s upcoming marriage. The boss was congratulating my ex, and then said that he was pleased that my ex had “come to his senses” and taken me back. In the next few minutes, I learned that 1) my ex was marrying the girl with whom he had cheated on me, 2) that my ex’s boss thought that she was a whore (and said so) and 3) that I was even more an idiot for continuing to help the lying jerk even after I divorced him.
I don’t know if this counts – but one time I went to e-mail my mom something about my boss’s hideous outfit but since she was on my mind, I accidentally e-mailed it to her. About ten minutes later, I had a sudden epiphany and went into her office where her computer was left unlocked. So I just deleted that bad boy (forever) and she never saw it. But I definitely was super careful after that and began to only e-mail from my personal e-mail address instead of my work one.
The stickiest situation I’ve ever been has still no ended. Five years ago, on one of my first days of high school, I didn’t know anyone in my class and I really wanted to be cool, so when our guidance councellor aske us to intoduce ourselves and tell us the things that are most important to us I told everyone that the most important thing to me was my boyfriend. I didn’t really have a boyfriend, only a huge crush on a very good friend of mine. Then, through out high school I continued telling this lie, developing my web of lies. During senior year we “broke up”. The problem is, that I always told everyone who this guy I was “going steady with” was, even showed photos of him to my now dearest friends and developed qiute a bit of drama between me and my “bf” during the last weeks of our “courtship”. The guy I was supposed to be dating is really important to me and a really good friend of mine to whom I can tell everything (except for the obvious) and so are the friends I made in high school: so now that I’m getting married to my boyfriend of three years (and he does really exist) I want to invite both my high school friends and the guy to our wedding, but am afraid of what might happen if and when the topic of our “relationship” should come up in some conversation…
So, the situation is undoubtedly a sticky one, and has tought me to NEVER lie about important stuff like that!
I was at an outdoor fair with my work and we had a booth set up. We were giving out a brouchures and about five hours into it I had to go to the bathroom. In the bathroom mirror I noticed that the ink from the brochures had melted and gotten all over my hand and face. No one bathered to tell me! I looked crazy!
I’ve had this happen in art classes in college all the time! Sometimes the model would tell me when I gave myself a unibrow with charcoal.
The stickiest situation happened one night when I was invited to the 21st birthday party of a girl who was the daughter of one of my then-boyfriend’s most important client. It started off well enough, the small talk was effortless, wine was good, people we met were funny, until it came to the time for the cake-cutting bit.
Now, the cake was basically made up of cupcakes all stacked up together to form a christmas tree. It was the first time I had ever seen something like this at the time, and I proceeded to move, excitedly, toward the cake to have a closer look.
Here’s when the trouble started, I got a little too close to the cakes and somehow managed to trip on someone’s foot that I swear was sticking out for no good reason, and BAM! I fell face-first onto the stack of cupcakes!!!
The entire stack fell and cupcakes started flying everywhere, all I remember were people looking on horrified, someone scrambling around to save the cakes, and I think I even heard someone scream. Turned out to be the birthday girl herself who screamed, and she actually broke down crying. It was horrible! Everyone started staring at me and my then-boyfriend actually said something that sounded like, ‘Look what you’ve done! I can’t take you anywhere!’ The last thing I remembered seeing was the family dog happily feasting on one of the cupcakes, which really didn’t help the situation either.
Needless to say, I didn’t stay very much longer, and even after sending the birthday girl a bouquet of flowers with a sorry card, they made it very clear to my then-boyfriend that he was to come solo to the subsequent parties they threw.
Sounds like the birthday girl needs to relax a bit… Haven’t they heard of laughing it off?
This is a true story, and I really wish it wasn’t…
Because of a weird combination of medications I am on, sometimes my BMs are a little out of my control, and they run from both extremes of not happening when I need them to or happening when I do not expect.
I was at Target, looking at curtains on sale, and that department happens to be on the opposite end of the store from the restrooms. Suddenly I felt that urge to go, and then half a second later it was too late, full-blown too late. I hid the curtains I wanted behind some other merchandise, because they were the last ones and it was a really good sale, then slowly, so as not to cause the issue to leave my underwear and trail down my leg, made my way to the restrooms. Realizing it could be showing through my jeans, I took off my zip-up hoodie and tied it around my waist, coolly sporting that look from the 90s.
After an eternity of slow walking and trying not to panic and have another form of a melt-down in the middle of the store (one of my meds is for anxiety, actually), I made it into the bathroom and luckily nobody else was in there. Entered the roomy handicap stall, took off my jeans, and my underwear (which I then threw away in the little can for used feminine products and undoubtedly leaving an awful odor for the future user of that stall). I used half of the toilet paper cleaning up my mess. From pulling them off I had a stain on the waist of my jeans, so underwear-less I pulled them back on (not comfortable at all), retied the hoodie around my waist, and calmly left the restroom and headed for the underwear department. Picked out a super cute pair in an effort to save some self-esteem, also picked out some running shorts to replace the stained jeans (forgetting I hadn’t shaved my legs in days), and then made my way back to the curtain department to pick up what I originally came to the store for. Bought all of these said items, wondering if the male worker at the register could tell my story from my face and my purchases, and then got in my car. Drove to Del Taco across the street, went into the restroom and changed. Then in my non-matching odd outfit proceeded to finish the rest of my errands, one of which was meeting my husband for lunch during which I had to explain my unusual outfit, but otherwise feeling much better because the new underwear was super cute, and I got an awesome deal on the curtains…
This happened about a month ago, and now I can finally laugh about it…a little…
And I now keep an extra pair of underwear in the glove compartment of my car…
This should be the winner!
And, Wendy, you are a trooper!
Sounds like someone needs some “Oops! I Crapped My Pants!” Sorry, SNL bit from ages ago. But seriously, I hope this issue has resolved itself or you figured out that some extra protection is necessary.
Does being covered in honey for an “artistic” photoshoot count? It was definitely sticky. *lol*
A lot of these sticky situations are very traumatic and horrible, so I’ll share a less dire one.
In college I worked at the front desk during the summer time, and there was no air conditioning. One of my co-workers had questionable hygiene, and I kept hearing people complain about his odor from the people who worked the shift after him. When I asked them if they told him about this, everyone said no. (They could bad-mouth the poor guy, but no one had the chutzpa to talk to him.) So, I volunteered to have “the talk” with him to help prevent further embarrassment.
I had no idea how to start that conversation because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but something needed to be said. I started off by saying, “If it was me, I would want you to tell me,” and then told him that by the end of his shifts he didn’t smell too fresh. That was one of the most awkward conversations I ever had with a colleague.
Hmmm… stickiest situation??? How about the day I walked in on my ex-husband wearing my undies and preening before the mirror?
They don’t make books for this kind of thing…
“Stuff your Mama never told you…”
My stickiest situation occurred on a first date. I was living in Michigan and the date lived in Ohio. After he picked me up we chatted on our way to the concert. he told me how great it was to meet a girl from Michigan, because his uncle had somehow already gotten to every girl he meets in Ohio. He then joked that he should make it a requirement to ask new girls, “Have you ever dated J—- R—?” I didn’t know what to say at that point, but my silence and red face gave me away. It turns out his uncle had crossed state lines. I told him to try and look at it from a positive perspective. At least we know his grandmother already likes me. I had known her for five years.
Mid winter, the locks on my car froze, all but one. So I opened the rear passenger’s side door, crawled across the seats, unlocked and punched open the driver’s door, then crawled back out (easier than getting my legs under me in my tiny car and going out the driver’s door) and shut the rear passenger door behind me. When I did so, I closed my giant winter coat in the now re-locked passenger door. The keys I dropped on the driver’s seat while i was in the car. I had to shimmy out of my coat to go around the car to get my keys to unlock the door I closed the coat in. All this to drive to my parent’s house to walk their dog while they were out of town, who had pooped on the floor before I got there anyway.
That’s not super-sticky I know, but it was ridiculous and exactly the kind of thing that happens to me all the time.
Example 2: Running through the Phoenix airport to catch my plane because my connecting flight was late getting in, the loops of my bootlaces got caught on the eyelets of the other boot, sending me face-down in the middle of the airport with two backpacks tumbling down on top of me…THREE TIMES. Still missed the damn plane and sprained my wrist too.
and example 3 of why my whole LIFE is a sticky situation: My mother-in-law has a bad leg, a glass eye, and penchant for telling people stories about her friend’s children’s therapist’s tax attorney with whom her conversation partners are not even acquainted. You can imagine how I relish her visits. She once visited us for dinner, arrived 45 minutes late (cold dinner, though really that’s my fault, she is at least reliably late everywhere she goes), had diarrhea ALL over our bathroom for a further 45 minutes (I mean it was everywhere) apologized about the rug, and went home.
My sticky situation happened in 2004. I was just about 6 months along with my first child (during the first months of my pregnancy I found out I have Hyperemesis while pregnant). The horrible symptoms had just abated when I got a call that my father was in the hospital. My husband and I were carless, but crammed into a friends vechicle and travelled to California to drop me off.
My dad had certain insurances, but not nearly enough insurance to cover what was going on, and the rest of my family didn’t have enough money to do what needed to be done, which was to somehow come up with the money to transfer my 380 lb father to a nursing home where he could be taken care of until he died. Since I was pregnant and his mother was older, my father was not going to be released into our care.
I pounded the pavement, made thousands of phone calls, and GOT my dad his extra insurance. Then I made sure he got into a nursing home where he would be happy. I even got him his own room. From diagnosis to termination of his life’s thread it was two weeks. Pancreatic cancer.
A sticky situation that ended for the best
That is hands-down one of the most difficult situations I could ever fathom. My hat’s off to you for having the poise to handle such an intense situation. My condolences on the loss of your father, and congratulations on the birth of your baby (now a child, I understand).
Definately handled with poise and grace! should be the winning entry!
Thank you both
I just got an email that said it was!!
A few years ago, I was invited to a 35 year anniversary dinner for a couple I knew, but to whom I was not terribly close. I was seated just to the right of the anniversary couple’s husband during dinner. We had a fabulous time as the couple reminisced about their life journey together and dinner was great.
Just as I am thinking they are the perfect couple and blessed to have found one another, I feel a hand stroking my thigh! At first, I couldn’t believe it but, there was no denying that the anniversary boy had someone, or something else, on his mind. I didn’t know what to do! I was shocked and embarrassed all at the same time. I finally decided to make a quick trip to the ladies room and as I was trying to get up to leave, his wife catches him in the act! She stands up and calls him and I every name in the book, tosses her wine in his face and storms out of the restaurant with her women friends in tow. There I was, with him, standing in the middle of a restaurant with everyone glowering at both of us. That was without doubt the stickiest situation I have ever experienced. I thought about trying to explain to the dear lady what happened, but what could I say that wouldn’t surely make things worse? Sadly, we haven’t spoken since that night.
My stickiest situation:
Five weeks before my wedding, I was feeling awful with a sore throat, achy muscles, and I was so tired but sleeping didn’t help. I was driving the ten hours home from college and suddenly my car stopped working five hours from home. I managed to make it to a nearby Waffle House after my cell phone died, where I waited hours for my family to make it to where I was and another five hours to get home.
A week later, I’d had a maximum of two continuous hours of sleep each night, I could hardly eat or drink because my throat was swollen, and I had no car, so my aunt drove me to the doctor’s office. There, I was diagnosed with tonsillitis. Since the strep test was negative, I went to the hospital for a blood test. Later that day I learned that mono was what had caused my tonsillitis. For my 21st birthday, I got 21 steroid pills to decrease the swelling in my throat.
As soon as I was back in motion, the wedding set-up continued, which was stressful and sticky enough as it was. Ten days before the wedding, my now-husband got into an accident, demolishing the last vestiges of any car we had. We were fortunate enough to get a nice, inexpensive car from a family member.
Finally, with the wedding plans complete, my man at my side, my body slowly recovering, and a car to get us to the honeymoon, I woke up and put on my engagement ring in preparation for my wedding rehearsal. Looking down at my hand to admire the ring, I couldn’t help but gasp.
A stone was missing. The day before my wedding, a stone was missing from my engagement ring. I went to one of the stores from the chain where it had been bought and they told me because of the warranty on it they would replace the stone for free but it would take more than the time I had. Instead I decided to manage with what I had and work the pictures around it, and it worked out fine.
That was the stickiest month of my life, but fortunately for me, it all led up to the best day and best decision of my life.
Can’t say I’ve every had what I’d call a sticky situation, but my sis has. Her and her hubby were stuck in traffic..the non moving kind, and she suddenly has what she affectionately refers to as “a gut attack”. Since they’re stuck and nowhere near an exit she grabs an empty Doritos bag from the back seat and proceeds to pull her pants down. Her horrified husband looks at her and says “No way, you’re not actually going to..OHHHHH MAAAAN!!” Yep…filled that poor Doritos bag right up with shat. Needless to say when she mentions she has to go these days, we’re always quick to ask “Anyone have a Doritos bag handy?”
probably not something extremely dire to the rest of the world, but here’s the setup:
asian american female in a highly religious family. i’d been with my boyfriend for about a year at that point, and we were just hanging out in the game room, when i jokingly reached down his pants…a moment later, my mother walks in. i don’t believe there’s anything as mortifying as your own mother catching you with your hand down someone’s pants.
i have no idea what i said, but apparently i’m quite the smooth talker while in shock, since after the obligatory awkward lecture about birds and bees and what is moral sexually they left me alone.
My stickiest situation was when I was in a failing relationship and met the man of my dreams…who happened to be my partner’s best friend. I would either have to confess everything and leave my partner for his friend or forget my perfect man and stay with my boyfriend. The choice would either ruin two guy’s friendships or my own desires.
So what DID you choose?
A few years ago I was studying in Paris where I lived with another American student. We ended up becoming close friends and socialized with the same group of people. One night, some friends invited us over to their apartment on the Champs d’Elysee before going to a club nearby. Decent wine being as cheap as it is in Paris, we thought it only polite to bring a bottle in thanks for inviting us over.
Unfortunately the friends were out and about and didn’t inform us that they would be late until we had already made our way to their apartment. Not wanting to wait around and miss the free entry deadline at the club, we decided to just meet our friends there. Knowing we wouldn’t be allowed to bring the wine into the club, we decided we could drink it on the walk there. After all, no poor college students want to waste good wine, regardless of how inexpensive.
It took us only a few minutes to realize the flaw in this seemingly great plan: no corkscrew. After contemplating terrible ideas such as breaking the top of the bottle open, prying the cork out with various objects on the street, and even spearing the cork on the ornamental spikes decorating the fences around us, we had an epiphany. Why did we need to remove the cork at all? Why not simply push the cork INTO the bottle?
After much experimenting and effort, we finally managed to push the cork down into the neck of the bottle with a key. We then jammed the plastic bag the wine had come in into the neck to fill the space between the reach of the key and the cork. Removing the plastic bag after the cork was finally floating free in the wine gave us access to the most troublesome, but rewarding, chardonnay I’ve ever had.
Sticky Situation:
This took place while I was in elementary school, probably 2nd or 3rd grade. I loooved recess. I loved it so much I didn’t want to waste recess time by using it to visit the rest room. Well… you know where this is going. I ended up wetting myself out on the blacktop. I quickly sat down on top of it, and contorted my legs to cover up where it was running to. I took of my jacket (it was spring) and laid it over my lap. I was mortified but stuck to a story of why I was sitting there. I think I told the other kids that I was too cold to stand or something like that. I waited until all the other kids went in to class and a teacher’s aide helped me up from there. Eeeek!
My stickiest situation was when my best friend tried to commit suicide. She rented a hotel room for two days. I was sick with a massive fever. When I realized something was wrong that I couldn’t get ahold of her, I had her brother in law drive me to the hotel room. We couldn’t get her to open the door. For over an hour, crisis units were trying to talk to her, nothing was working. I finally got her to open it by telling her if she didn’t, the police would break down the door and the windows, and she would have to pay for it. Can you believe that worked?
No offense to anybody, but… if s(he) really wanted to kill him/herself then why did s(he) care about paying?
My stickiest situation is figuring out my wedding list – there are several people who I want to invite who absolutely hate each other. One of my aunts cannot stand to be in the same room as my father, but they’re both family and I want them there. My fiance’s best friend and one of my best friends used to date, and there is still some awkwardness between them. There is someone invited who is constantly getting down on my fiance for ‘not having a good enough job’ and nags me about my weight – but she’s family and it’s an insult not to invite her even though I’m terrified she’ll ruin everything.
This is not even to mention the won’t-admit-he-has-a-problem alcoholic who has to be invited because we love his wife and kids, who insists everyone around him keep up with his drinking, and the fact that several recovering alcoholics will be in attendance. Eek.
I haven’t even tried to figure out the seating arrangements yet – my head might explode. And the wedding is THIS FALL. I don’t know how I’ll have everything sorted in time, or how I can have everyone who needs to be at this wedding in the same room without a riot starting.
Ah yes…weddings can be quite sticky indeed. Just remember that it’s your day and you and your man are not going to let anyone ruin it no matter how hard they may try, so stay focused on each other and the rest will be a non issue. Best of luck!
I got married this spring. I had some of the same headaches, and said to heck with it – I did NOT invite the problem alcoholic in my family, but I did invite the rest of the family. (And no, I didn’t invite my estranged father, because he would’ve said horrible things about my mother, and possibly horrible things about how I shouldn’t be getting married to my husband.) And I explained to everyone why the problem people were not invited – couldn’t be trusted not to cause a bad scene.
This is a very special day for you and your soon-to-be-husband. Do NOT feel obligated to invite anyone that won’t be ready to support you both in your new life together, and celebrate the great day with you. Even if that means excluding family. If they’re going to ruin your day by talking trash about either of you – don’t invite them. And take the time now to voice your concerns with your mom, or whichever family members are helping you put together your wedding and reception and guest list.
If you must invite a problem alcoholic, make sure someone other than you or your husband is responsible for a) chaperoning the problem person, and b) taking responsibility for cutting him off when he’s had enough, or removing him if it comes to the last resort. (And warn all the waiters and servers, so they don’t enable bad behavior.)
Because we had a few other borderline people – who might not stay in control of their own consumption – we limited the alcohol: a selection of water, sodas, and wines (pre-arranged with the restaurant) was available per glass from the bartender during the cocktail hour, or guests could pay for their own mixed drinks. Dinner was paired with wine poured by the waiters, and no bottles of wine were left on the tables – so the lushes couldn’t pour themselves glass after glass and wind up in trouble.
As to seating arrangements, every guest for the reception had a favor with a name-card attached, and all the favors were on a table just inside the dining room. As the guests arrived at the restaurant, they picked up their favors and placed them on the plate of the seat they wanted, then continued on to the cocktail reception in the next room. NOBODY could complain to me about the seating arrangement, because it was all up to them to sort themselves out and find people they wanted to sit with. And you know what? It worked. Everyone was happy.
Bottom line: the wedding is for you and your fiance to move from being seriously committed to actually married. You are beginning a new phase of your lives that will last from that day to forever. It’s a solemn and joyous occasion, and you have the ceremony witnessed by just those family members and friends that will support you both in your new life together, and help you when you hit those patches of poorer, sicker, worse. Then you have the reception to celebrate. Anybody that can’t follow that script shouldn’t bother showing up.
My sticky situation involves my two friends, a guy and a girl. I introduced them to each other and they hit it off and began dating. After they had been dating for a month or so, the girl finds out that she’s pregnant. She’s in college and doesn’t want the baby. She tells me she’s pregnant and not the guy. She asks for advice and I suggest that she needs to talk to someone and consider talking to the guy before she does anything. I don’t tell the guy whats going on because it is definitely not my place. She decides she’s not going to tell him what is going on.
She has an abortion and calls the guy to tell him what happened and that she had the procedure. The guy is absolutely furious (with good reason, obviously) and the girl is not good with confrontation so instead of being a woman and talking to him about this in an adult manner, she tells him that he needs to call ME. He was then absolutely furious with me and thought that I should have told him about the pregnancy and that she wanted an abortion. Oh, on top of that, he called me at work because the girl refused to speak to him anymore and at this point had put me in the middle. So I’m in the office, trying to keep my voice down so no one would hear what was going on. It was definitely the stickiest situation I’ve ever been in.
My stickiest situation is a current one. My husband and I decided to get married on May 21st (one week ago) for several reasons. However we don’t have the money for a big wedding so that my very large, very mexican family can attend. So we decided to have a simple legal wedding at the County Clerks Office with just my parents and siblings as witnesses. We’re going to save money up for a year and a half so we can have the big formal wedding. I don’t want my family asking questions about why we chose to do it this way so we decided to keep our recent legal wedding a secret, and continue acting as if were still engaged.
However now most of my step-mother’s side of the family somehow knows already and since they obviously don’t know the meaning of “secret” I’m worried that my side of the family, who does not know the meaning of “private” is going to find out from the rumor mill. So now my choices are either to try and cover this all up, or to just come clean with the entire family and hope they don’t give me too much grief while staying out of my personal business….
I’ve always seemed to have a knack for grabbing the attention of… strange people.
It was the first day of my senior year in high school and my first period class was Chorus. At the end of that class, I was approached by a gothed-out freshmen boy who said he couldn’t help but notice my lovely singing voice. I was a little weirded out, but I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. By the end of the conversation, he somehow convinced me to give him my phone number and screen name. At school, he’d give me pictures of his Sonic characters, meet me at my locker, and talk to me before Chorus and during the Chorus break. In a group conversation, he’d get incredibly mad if I diverted my attention from him even for a second. After school, he’d call just to chat. His favorite topic was skying. I haven’t skied a day in my life and I got bored of his skying stories very quickly. These conversations went on for a while. I come to find out the reason this guy never seemed to pick up on my boredom was because he had Aspergers, which made it even harder for me to get him off my back in a somewhat civil manner. He also had a crush on me. Eventually, my patience ran out and I told him off. According to several of my friends, one of his favorite passtimes after that included drawing pictures of himself brutally murdering me. I spent the last year of high school, fearful of a freshmen.
I had developed a crush on this man that I’d worked with for years. We had hung out with mutual friends but never gone out one on one. I was completely stoked when he asked me on a date and we made plans to go out the following weekend. The evening of the date arrived and I was so excited and nervous. I got out of the shower and realized that I was out of moisturizer. I had plenty of time to get ready, so I ran out to the drugstore to pick some up. I found what I needed and went to the register to pay. As soon as I got in line I noticed that the person in front of me, paying, was The Man! So there I was: hair still wet from the shower, in lounge clothes, no makeup right behind the man I so desperately wanted to make a good impression on. Talk about a sticky situation! So I did what any self-respecting woman would do – ran out of line as fast as I could and down the nearest aisle. When he picked me up later that evening he told me that I looked beautiful, but he was sort of hoping I’d still be in my pj pants and tank top. I was busted after all.
One of these stories made me recall one sticky moment in my life. Me and my highschool sweetheart were happily shagging away in his room. His family wasn’t home so we weren’t worried about someone catching us. Well, so we thought. About halfway through the act, his dad suddenly opens the door and stands there staring at us. It’s at night luckily so the only light in the room is coming from behind him in the hallway. I’m on bottom and I immediately try to grasp ahold of the blanket to cover me, thus inadvertantly pulling it off my boyfriend’s naked rear. He’s clasping at it frantically, all the while trying to remain calm and unassuming as his dad asks him various questions like how we’re doing and what our plans were that evening. lol Yes his dad knew what we were in the middle of, but he was a cool guy and had two older sons so he’d been down this road before. He made us squirm for awhile longer just because he could (and I’m sure it was amusing as hell) and then left. Now if it had been MY dad..my boyfriend would have been scraping his nuts up off the floor with a putty knife.
Well… my stickiest situation was pretty serious….
Me and some friends went to another friend’s house. Her party was really lame and boring, so our friends decided to walk around the neighbourhood, I however, stayed with my hostess.
When they came back, they told us about this awesome house, which was still in construction, and therefore empty. We went there and climbed to the roof (note, the stairs were on the outside of the house). We were there, just laughing at the wet pants (yes, wet pants… the night before it had rained… got no idea about the jeans) and the empty beer bottles, when the pants slipped through a skylight, we kept on laughing, when we heard someone scream “who’s there?!”
We ran all the way down, but our hostess friend was captured by the owner of the house.
The rest of us ran as far as we could, and could have gotten out of the trouble, but we thought it would have been really terrible to leave our friend the whole responsability, so we ran back to find out the lady was almost calling the police, “luckily” the guardian of the neighbourhood (it was a private one) was -according to the owner of the house- drunk. The hostess parents came and clarify the situation, so the lady just claimed money for the “roble doors ruined” (which I guess they didn’t pay for that lie)
Good luck for the drunken police and being 14 and having parents, don’t you think?
I have no idea what this is even about…. you need a better translator…. sheesh
My stickiest situation was when I went bowling with my boyfriend and his friends very shortly after we got together. I hadn’t been bowling in about a decade and I remembered the general procedure: throw the ball down the lane to the pins. Simple, right? Well I forgot that you are supposed to STOP at the little line… Yeah.
Fast forward to me going too far and slipping and falling- it was like a Fcartoon… my hands flew up and the ball went into the air. First I landed on my behind. Then I hit the back of my head. And, as we know, what goes up must come down. The bowling ball landed about 3″ from my head and rolled over 2 lanes and hit some guy in the foot.
The place was packed and everyone was pointing and laughing. I looked to my boyfriend who was laughing so hard he literally fell off the bench. I stood up, brushed myself off, and promptly went and hid in the bathroom for the remainder of the game.
While sitting in the stall, I heard two girls come in laughing and joking about the girl who fell on her bum. I came out of the stall and said, “Oh yeah, that was me. Just call me Grace!”
They shut up and I felt pretty good about it.
I still haven’t lived this down 12 years later, but I’m still with said ROFL boyfriend!
My stickiest situation would have to be the one I am in now. I am unemployed and diligently searching with still no hope of finding a job because of my age and the economy. I am obligated to pay rent and the phone plan i am on thanks to a friend will be shut off in on jun 2nd which is my only phone to receive calls for potential jobs. Its either this or the 12 hours i spent sitting in between my first boyfriend who still loves me and my then current boyfriend
What!?
I didn’t know how to tell my mother I was pregnant. I had been engaged for nine months, and she had just made a trip down to help plan our wedding. My fiance and I both agreed we wanted to move the date up so we would be married before the baby came. She didn’t speak to me for a week. At least we got married, had our wonderful son, and my mom visits all the time now just to spend time with him!
I walked in on my (former) husband, his girlfriend and his brother. The girlfriend was watching.
WTF??!!
When I was 13 or 14 my mom dropped me off at the movies with a girlfriend. We were sneaky girls, and we didn’t go to the movie. We drove around town with some boys we’d met earlier that day at the mall. When my mom came to pick us up a couple hours later, a police officer told her that he’d noticed we never went inside the theater. I insisted that he had me confused with someone else. She asked what movie we saw. Unfortunatly, I insisted we’d seen a movie that was not playing at the theater. But I stuck to my story!
please pick me to win a copy of this book. i can’t even pick a stickiest situation from my own life…i’m just so accident-prone lol!
So my (now ex) boyfriend told me that he and his wife had an open relationship – she just didn’t want to hear about the details. (Yeah yeah – I should date non-married men, trust me, lesson learned.) Well she and I were friends and I did try to confirm this with her a couple of times but each time I brought it up she looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language and changed the subject. This seemed to verify what he’d said.
So a year and a half down the road, I find out that I’m not his only dish on the side and that he’s NOT been following good safe protocol, so I call it off. His WIFE starts texting me wondering why I’m no longer talking to him and can I please just be his friend because he really needs one right now. So I relent and the three of us make a pretty good set of friends. Until …
As his friend I felt I could now tell him that he needed to quit messing around no matter what she said she was ok with, since she obviously wasn’t, or leave her so she can find someone who will really give her what she needs. So he’s out of town, she and I are hanging out when – he asks for a divorce, over the phone. And I’m the one there to comfort her – for three days until he comes back. Oy.
Oh – it gets better. The wife (soon to be ex but holding on with teeth and claws) is away for the night at a girl’s get together and one of the girls there mentions that she had once dated the guy. Wife FREAKS OUT. She had NO IDEA. She demands to know if he’s seeing anyone currently. The girl who spilled the beans demurs, but someone from the back of the crowd says, “Isn’t he seeing Shara?” Can you say, “Sh!t meet fan”?
So three months after I’d dumped him she’s hurt, broken and demanding to talk to me – and rips him a new one. I declined and simply emailed her that he had lied to me too and that I wasn’t the only one. He, in an attempt to somewhat appease her (though they were already working on the divorce so I don’t know why) agrees not to see or talk to me until the divorce is final. Fine by me!
I was studying in France and a friend came to visit from Britain. We spent the day walking arount and going to all the local tourist attractions and went to have a drink at a beautiful cafe overlooking the Eiffel Tower (probably because a Coke was the only thing one could afford there
).
In Paris all the tables are more or less on the street corners and very close to each other. Next to us a kid got up and left his plate of chips completely untouched, and the friend quickly grabbed the plate of the table and climbed into the chips.
The (very french) waiter saw this and gave us more than a piece of his mind (propbably wanted the chips for himself). He was shouting in French and of course I understood every word, but we acted stupid, looking at him questionally, speaking broken english and communicating to each other in Afrikaans. The poor waiter got so frustrated that he left us right then and there.
I try to avoid “situations”. Can’t think of the stickiest, but I think things generally get really sticky when it came to the rental market. Trying to find a place to live in only two weeks and with a tiny budget was really sticky! Found a place, but that place itself became very sticky! the neighbours upstairs were crackheads who liked to come downstairs very late at night to ask for cash.
We had to share utilities with them . Nearly got the power shut off. We lost about $700.
Sticky situations, oh how there have been many! My worst though became a repeat. Apparently I hadn’t embarrassed the involved parties (and myself) enough the first time around!
When my boyfriend-at-the-time was asked to be best man in a friend’s wedding, his bride-to-be invited me to be a bridesmaid. There were 6 groomsmen and 6 bridesmaids in the wedding party, so the engaged couple hosted a “get to know each other” gathering where we were all forced to play silly party games. During one such game that involved competing in pairs, there was awkward and reluctant coupling up and I suggested that a friend get to partner “with his wife”… at which point they look at me and say “yeah… we’re separated and getting a divorce” as I’ve outed them in front of a crowd of their friends.
A few months later I hosted a party and invited part of the divorcing couple. They arrive together and while I’m making introductions, I’m forced to stumble over myself and end up saying “this is Jason and his… frie… wi…. person.” After which they explain that they are still married but feel obligated to explain my confusion by retelling stories of their many partings and reconciliations. Two years later, with the divorce in its last proceedings, the male half of the couple starts dating (and clinging to!) one of my friends… that stickiness is still ongoing.
My stickiest situation was running in to an exboyfriend at the gym years after I broke up with him. The same ex who had slashed my tires after I broke up with him following a whole 2 weeks of dating. He waited outside the ladies changing room for me, to tell me that he didn’t want there to be “any hard feelings” and that it was all “water under the bridge”.
Stickiest Situation: After graduating from high school I spent a crazy week at the beach with my girlfriends. Unfortunately, one day i passed out in the sun and got SEVERE sunburn all down the back of my legs. Repeat, SEVERE sunburn. That night we went out and, alas, it happened that one thing led to another and i ended up losing my virginity to some tool. The sticky part… During our ‘courtship’ i could feel a LOT of wetness running down my legs etc, not sure if this is normal i let it slide. The next morning, turned out my legs had completly blistered (butt to ankle!) from the burn, then BURST as we were getting nasty, leaving me stuck to his sheets and consequently taken to hospital for some very painful bedding removal and bandaging which i had to wear for months.
OMG, I think you win from the sheer torture of it. How could you stand to have sex during all that pain from your blistered flesh??! FUCK!
I had to tell a good friend of mine that her best friend had been sleeping with her husband for years, and the reason I never said anything was becasue she never asked me directly until then.
My stickiest situation was when I broke a big jar of honey all over the kitchen floor, and myself. Took over an hour to get all of it cleaned up, plus a shower and a load of laundry.
I can has book now?
The stickiest situation I have been in involved two pairs of friends: one had an open relationship with her fiance and the other had just gotten commited with a new boyfriend.
Trouble is, the new boyfriend–hours before asking her to go steadh–had had sex with the other woman. While her fiance was sick upstairs. The other woman had brought our friend and the boyfriend together, too…I learned about the sticky situation from the woman with the fiance. She wanted to talk about it and expected me not to tell my friend, and for a long time, I didn’t…especially because I had hints that something was still going on in terms of tension between the woman with the fiance and my friend’s boyfriend.
I eventually told m friend and she said she ‘trusted’ them. Now she’s engaged to the boyfriend (never a nice guy). I dropped her as a friend a while ago…the lesson on how to get out of a situation like that? Don’t put it off, tell your friend as soon as you find out. Might as well get the suffering over with.
Try getting your monthly visit from Aunt Flo a week ahead schedule and you’re wearing white shorts.
I’ve never been happier to have worn layers to cover the back….. the front was a little trickier.
On a road trip with my mother, we stopped for breakfast in a one-stoplight town in Wyoming. The only cafe in town had four or five people enjoying coffee and what looked like a worthwhile breakfast. We sat on high red pleather stools, turned our coffee cups over and waited to be served. After fifteen minutes of seeing everyone in the place served, I called the waitress over to us and asked to see a menu. She looked me up and down, disgusted, and walked back to the kitchen. The cook came out and leaned across the counter towards me. “We don’t serve your kind, he said in the scratchy degrading voice you would imagine that phrase would be said in. My mother is white and my father black, making me a milk chocolate brown. My mother’s mouth was gaping and I had no idea what to do. “Really?” I stuttered, “because I’m… black?” The cook found and leaned further in, “No, we don’t serve dykes.” My mother and I burst out laughing. We left without being served, with tears in our eyes — tears of laughter. We laughed for a good minute, the entire restaurant staring at us as we made our exit.
I had just brought my cat back from being neutered. He was still in the only cage I could find to transport him in – a chicken show cage. The vet had told me not to let him out until he was no longer loopy, and boy was he loopy – one eye was completely dilated while the other was normal, he would try to walk around but would teeter over and fall, and he kept panting. I decided to ignore the vet and hold him for a bit to calm him down. Bad move. With unexpected speed, he vaulted out of my arms and proceeded to tear off across the yard towards the woods. In only my socks, I had to chase him across the yard, into a shed, out of the shed, into the woods, over a barbed wire fence (tearing my sock open), under a lot of low brush, around a pond, over another fence, until I finally caught him up in the woods. The whole time he would intermittently sprint, fall on his side (still running), then jump away as soon as I got close. My reward for catching him? He peed all over my pant leg, then spent the rest of the day trying to claw his tongue off.
My period caught me by surprise. I have a heavy flow. I was wearing a miniskirt. Then I tripped. ‘Nuf said.