Word: awkwardness
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...might not have anticipated such an influence entering the University in 1950. In his 1989 memoirs, Self-Consciousness, Updike casts himself as an awkward and skittish freshman, terrified of the world he found in Cambridge. He reports being particularly afraid of insects, water, and lobsters—an unpropitious set of worries for a young man coming to New England for the first time...
...personal essay, Updike described his experience at Harvard as a slightly awkward metamorphosis period between a fairly secluded childhood and the butterfly-like confidence of young adulthood. But even if Harvard was Updike’s cocoon it has figured rarely in his oeuvre. While his short fiction in particular—more than a dozen short story collections spanning 50 years—echoes his own biography, only one story explicitly draws on Updike’s undergraduate experience. A 1963 piece called “The Christian Roommates” centers on the first-year experience of Orson...
...between Taiwan, China and the U.S. What's said and unsaid can either generate harmony (or at least a temporary truce in the continual war of words between Taipei and Beijing), or friction, or at worst outright conflict. In this complex triangular relationship, Washington is in the most awkward position. It has a "one China" policy but is obligated by its Taiwan Relations Act to come to the island's defense if Taiwan is attacked by the Chinese military. Indeed, in 1996, Washington dispatched two aircraft carriers to the waters off Taiwan after Beijing fired unarmed missiles at the island...
This may seem like an awkward time for Abizaid and the forces he commands to accentuate the positive. By many measures, the U.S. enterprise in Iraq remains a chaotic, costly slog. The prison scandal has plainly made the goal of winning Iraqi hearts and minds remote. Last week's brutal videotaped decapitation of American Nicholas Berg, 26, showed again just how dangerous Iraq remains. Even Donald Rumsfeld, the embattled Defense Secretary, acknowledged at least the possibility that the grand American design for Iraq--a stable democracy at the heart of the autocratic Arab world--might end in failure...
Given some other libraries’ unsubstantiated reports of coercion from government officials, he says it is possible library workers could find themselves in an awkward position with contradictory imperatives from the government and their employers. “Either they get in trouble with their supervisor or they get in trouble with the law,” he says...