The Land of the Free, and the Home of the Awkward Goodbye.

Is there anything that leaves you with a more lingering, stickier feeling of uneasiness and angst than when you have an awkward goodbye exchange with a girl you barely know? You go for the hug; she's trying to cheek-kiss. You extend your hand for a shake, and it turns into a ninja chop when she runs into it while going in for the hug. Or the worst: you try to kiss her cheek, and she's thinking something else, and your nose ends up Eskimo kissing her ear, and you say something like, "It was good to ... see, you ..." This happened to me today, and it took almost 45 minutes for me to get that ugh feeling off of me, the one you get when you know you just made a fool of yourself back there.

I hate unfamiliar male-female exchanges. They only happen in America.

In this country, kids hug and adults kiss. (And some adults, like The Bob, kiss women on the lips, even their cousins, which I find extremely weird.) But everyone else in between -- like me, age 24 -- floats in an undulating sea of awkwardness when it comes to gauging the level of familiarity they possess with a new friend of the opposite sex.

In Europe, it's easy: you kiss them on the cheeks. How many kisses depends on the country. In Spain, it's two. In Serbia -- at least with O.G. Zoka -- it was always just one. And in Switzerland, you give three, a custom that can become rather tedious the more people you add, as trois bisous become six, neuf ... large groups of girls in Geneva can be quite a douze-ee (yes!). They don't kiss in East Africa, but nor do they hug. Over there, it's just handshakes, or it's you gripping a woman's wrist and shaking it, if she's in the middle of cooking or cleaning and doesn't feel she can present you with her hand.

Drawbacks to the Tanzanian system: sometimes you're not trying to maintain such a rigid distance when you're running game on a pretty girl.

Drawbacks to the European kiss system: the possibility of offending those girls who look like guys. Pat would have developed a huge complex had he/she been raised across the pond. When you're meeting a What-sex-am-I?, and you guess wrong by trying to shake their hand after giving the trois bisous to all their pretty friends, you will be exposed as an asshole. This actually happened to me once in Switzerland, no joke. My friend Letitia, whose house I was staying at in Morges, invited all her basketball friends over one day, and the point guard looked more like Steve Nash than Sue Bird. I mistook her for a tag-along kid brother, slapping her palm and extending for the Genevoise fist bump. She didn't say anything, and I heard no giggling, but I still looked like a fool. I'd already dished out 12 bonjour kisses to the forwards, the center and the shooting guard, after all. I couldn't play the "What? I'm American!" card and act like I didn't know about the kissing deal.

Ten minutes later, Letitia wrote a text message on her phone and passed the 21st century version of a note to me. You can guess what it said. I pounded a few words into the keypad and passed it back her way, letting her know that she was too late. I'd already been informed of my gaffe. Tag-along Nash had boobs so big, not even a XXXL t-shirt could have concealed the bulge.

When Letitia's teammates left, I gave out 15 au revoir kisses.

I really don't care if it's kisses or handshakes, or wrist shakes, for that matter. I just want some uniformity. I want a system in place that will prevent me from going in for a kiss when she's trying for the hug, or the handshake when she's going for the kiss. I want there to be no confusion about what's coming. I want some freaking consistency in our cultural fabric.

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This isn't really related, but it still has to do with awkwardness between the sexes.

I am horrible with names. It's actually one of the parts of my personality I'm the most embarrassed about. I think it's really rude that I forget names as often as I do, and it shows a lack of respect to the person I've just met -- you weren't important enough for me to remember your name. Don't you agree?

Tonight, I had dinner with a friend, who brought a friend. And I forgot her name, less than two seconds after she told it to me.

Once again.

All dinner, I was hoping it would come up in conversation, either as the opener to a question or story from the person I did know -- ("So, Susan, I hear you ran into my friend Steve last week.") -- or as part of a story delivered by the mystery girl herself, when another person is quoted using her name -- ("And then my boss was like, 'Susan, I need you to finish this for me by the end of the day.'") This is what you're forced to resort to when you don't focus at the beginning. And guess what? Her name never came up again. I was one and done, and by the end of the dinner, there was no way I could ask for a second time.

All of us walked outside and gave our hugs -- no awkwardness here -- and I thought I had escaped without being exposed. But no: we had talked during dinner about how many people she knows here in Austin, and she had promised to help me find a job. So she offered to give me her number.

Shit.

"Sure," I said, trying to think fast. "Here." I handed her my phone. "Just type it in there."

The obvious intention being that she would save her name along with it. Oldest trick in the book.

She started punching keys, and gave it back to me. "There you go," she said.

"Thanks." I looked down: just the number. Shit. "I'll call you later," I said, knowing full well that I could not do that without a name.

I saved it as L. It's short for Later.