two faux pas from the past

But I leave it up to you to decide if they were my faux pas. If I was guilty of anything I was guilty of (admittedly a bad crime) throwing in a cryptic/disruptive statement to try and short-circuit a conversation I wasn't that interested in and hopefully turn it to something I was interested in.

There are a lot of these in my mind - but for some reason I can only conjure up two at once, not always the same two. Here are two, and hopefully putting them here will free up some more for exorcism.

(1) This is a doozy. A friend confided that her grandmother had back problems. I made a non-sequiteur statement about how she shouldn't have been carrying such a heavy backpack. OK, it's a stupid thing to say but it was just in the general scheme of it being possibly a slightly humorous idea, old people doing strenuous things as though they were still young. Answer: 'Oh, I know what you mean. Yes it's because she has large breasts.'

(2) Talking to an acquaintance of Vietnamese (I think) extraction. I asked where she was living. She said Richmond. I said, 'Oh, North Richmond?' as a prelude to: that's the part of Richmond I used to live in, for six months or so in '96. Answer a very cold no. Instantly I realised (or imagined) that she thought I was making an assumption that, as someone of Vietnamese extraction, she would of course want to live in North Richmond where many other people of Vietnamese extraction lived.

(1) is just crazy; (2) is bad luck; but how would you get out of either?