Muddy Awkwardness

Being in an awkward situation is like getting mud on your hands - it feels gooey and there is no place to wipe it off.  But once your hands are covered in mud you may as stick them back in the mud since it's impossible for them to get more muddy.  It's breaking the barrier between clean and muddy hands that is the hardest part.  If there is no nearby public restroom, you may as well just embrace the muddiness.

Another good comparison would be to tie-dyeing a t-shirt.  You wrap the white shirt carefully, trying to envision how cool it will look when it's done.  Then you dip it in the blue dye to find that it is actually a dark purple color, ruining all dreams of a pretty tie-dyed shirt.  At this point you remember that you wouldn't actually wear a tie-dye shirt in public anyways, so you just randomly throw in other colors without care.  Unwrapping the shirt you realize how terrible it looks, but you are so far from caring at this point you decide to use it as a painting shirt.

Although the tie-dye analogy doesn't work as well because the shirt is permanently colored, while awkwardness is a temporary phenomenon.  But if you happened to be wearing an ugly tie-dye t-shirt when you get mud on your hands, you could just wipe your hands on your shirt and wash it later.  Even better, if you had a friend wearing the tie-dyed t-shirt, you could wipe your hands on their shirt.