Well, I've been giving it a lot of thought, and I've finally unearthed some memories of times I've really felt stupid. Well, 2 times I've really felt stupid, and 3 times where I probably should have but didn't.
The times I should have been embarrassed are as follows:
-I attended a sleepaway camp, Camp Allegheny, one year for three weeks in the summer. One of my activities was theater. Mind you, Camp Allegheny happened right after I finished attending that summer's Performing Arts Camp, so I fancied myself pretty much a pro. I think I got a part as a doctor in some play, maybe "Murder on the Orient Express." The details are fuzzy, and not just because I have a crappy memory.
When I first met the director, I thought she was a pretty cool lady. We got into rehearsals, and it was really laid-back. We spent entire sessions just picking out our costumes or "learning lines" while the director was not in the room. Yeah. I kept thinking, "Gosh, she is so different from all the PAC directors who just yell at you all the time to be quiet and stop messing around! They're mean!"
Fast forward to the performance where literally no one knew more than maybe one of every three lines they were supposed to be speaking. It was in front of the entire camp, and it was almost funny, as we kept ad-libbing excuses to get off stage and leave the poor other actresses in front of the whole camp's glaring eyes. But it wasn't funny. It was awkward and may have been the cause for subsequent years of nightmares for me. But I don't remember being too embarrassed at the time. Maybe it was because I actually knew my lines, but no one knew the ones that prompted mine. That was probably it. I'm great.
-I feel nauseous if anyone offers me breakfast before 10:00 AM. Justin sweetly offered to make me a scrambled egg one morning he had off and I had to go to work, and all I could imagine was a slimy wiggly chicken embryo. Anyway, I didn't eat breakfast in high school either.
One day, we went on a field trip to the PPG chemical plant. I started feeling a little lightheaded and nauseous on our walking tour, but I've had stomach problems my whole life, so I pretty much ignored it. That is, until I started seeing in only black and white. In mid-sentence of telling my 4-foot-tall female tour guide (I was and still am 5'7") that I didn't feel well, I passed out on her.
I awoke a couple minutes later in some back room, where some people were nervously handing me a Sprite and other stuff with sugar in it. I guess my big scene sparked a scandal amongst the rest of the class that I had been felled by an evil chemical leak, but the people in the room told me that it was because I was hypoglycemic and I should have eaten breakfast.
Whatever. It hasn't happened since, but since I can't climb up walls or rip through my shirt when somebody makes me angry, I guess I should have just eaten breakfast that day.
But again, it's hard to feel embarrassed when you can't even be bothered to stay standing up. I wonder if the woman caught me or dropped me like a sack of flour. I guess I should feel embarrassed if I crushed her.
-This one happened about a year ago. This was a time where I didn't work Mondays, and Justin and I shared a car. Translation: unless I wanted to be homebound and forced to watch Forensic Files all day (not actually a bad thing), I had to get up at the crack of dawn and drive with Justin to work so I could have the car the remainder of the day.
Now, this is probably illegal, but I was frigging tired, so I hopped in the car in just my pajamas and slippers. I don't know. Maybe it's not illegal. My mom just always told me to drive with shoes on. I guess this is why.
We got a flat tire on the way to work. Luckily, I didn't have to walk or anything, but I did have to sit in the lobby of the tire place with bed head, cloud pants, and bee slippers, angrily reading a National Geographic and daring anyone to look at me funny. I guess I could have been a little embarrassed there, but I was more mad that I wasn't asleep in my comfy bed.
So that's my not-embarrassing stuff. My embarrassing stuff is probably going to seem wussy to you, but I noticed that all the stuff I'm not embarrassed about happened with me doing something dumb in front of strangers. The stuff that embarrasses me is what I do around friends.
-This one's short. In high school, I decided to participate in a talent show, wherein my friend Tom would play the guitar, and I would sing Jewel's "You Were Meant For Me." I don't know what other people do at talent shows, but I always thought they would dance, juggle, act out a scene from a play, whatever. Anyway, I sat one day at lunch with the cool kids, and I thought they were going to make fun of me for participating. Instead, my friend Sarah said, "No, I think it's cool. I'm gonna give you props for doing that."
To which I replied, "Um, I really think we're just gonna need the guitar, but, yeah, I guess it would be more interesting if I used some props."
Listen. The damn slang word "props" was invented like a week prior! Come on. I can't keep up with all the cool slang now, and I couldn't then!
Agh, and then they all laughed at me because I'm a moron.
-This one happened more recently, at Performing Arts Camp last summer.
First I need to preface this story by saying this -- I once had a physics teacher who was pretty young, and he was always joking with and almost kissing up to the popular kids in class, even though they weren't the best students. This may be a regular thing at some schools, but the kids would even suggest that he call off class, and he would kind of look around the room and ask, "Should I do it?" It's hard to explain -- he was meek, yet adventurous. It wasn't until a few years later that I realized that he was reliving his childhood. He was finally getting respect from the popular kids, and getting street cred (hah! See? I'm hip!) for daring to break a rule.
The same thing happens to me at Performing Arts Camp. By the time the students reach their last year, they get so talented but still cool that I have flashes of all the talented-and-cool kids that never gave me the time of day when I was young. Since I'm a faculty member to them, I try to remain professional, but inside I yearn for their acceptance. Sick, no?
Anyway, there was one such guy last year, and I will leave out his name, even though some of my camper readers know him. After the first day of camp, everyone was waiting outside for their friends at the end of the day. I hadn't seen him since the year before because I do office work on the first day, but watching him waiting for his ride, I noticed that he had some stage makeup in his hair to make him look like a dignified character.
"Gee, you're looking a little older, buddy," I joked with him.
"Huh?" he asked.
As I got a closer look, my inner monologue was like out of a sitcom: Gosh, they really did a good job on his hair. Yeah, there aren't any streaks or anything. It's uniform around his whole head. It's almost too good -- HOLY CRAP THAT'S HIS REAL HAIR.
I literally turned on my heel and just walked away. He hadn't had it a year ago, and I have no idea if he was even embarrassed about it. But I'm guessing people don't often walk up to someone with acne and go, "Gee, you've got something all over your face!"
Anyway, those are my stories. I still feel awful about the last one, just because I would hate to be the reason for embarrassing someone. Accidentally anyway.
I hope you've enjoyed my trip down repressed memory lane. I think I'm going to curl up in the fetal position and go rock somewhere now.
I have been thinking of this for some time now, and CALL ME CRAZY, I just decided to post about it today.
I have always tried to be aware of what I put on the internet. I don't think that I would ever have been in danger of being dooced even if I were in the work force before this happened and inspired journalists for years to come when they needed to be hip and tech-savvy, only there hadn't been enough MySpace rapings lately.
Not to make this blog about all the terrible things I've done to Melissa over the years, but it only took one post about how I was kind of tired of people staying at my house, when she...happened to be staying at my house, that made me learn that, yes, some people actually do read this website and could get affected by it.
A few years later, I insulted a prominent Pittsburgh DJ, forgot about it, became kind of friend-of-a-friend to him a few years later, THEN had some listener google him and rat me out on his show. That was mildly awkward, but I had been inspired to bash him on my blog when I heard someone quote a Jack Black Tenacious D-ism and attribute it to him, as he used it as one of his bumpers before a commercial.
So I've always tried to write things that wouldn't get me in trouble. I barely talk about my job. I didn't even post when my online boyfriend moved in with me. I've even cut down a little on swearing, but that's because I don't really do it much in my everyday speech anymore. I've had this website for 5 years, from ages 21 to 26, and, yeah, a lot has happened, and when I read back, I see that I've changed a lot.
Every once in a while I get the urge to go back and delete all my archives and pictures. They're not really so bad, but they're not me anymore. They've helped make me who I've become, but they are no longer what I am. I think this will start to be something that a lot of early-adapter bloggers will be coming across now. God, think if I had a MySpace when I was 16! It makes me want to crawl under a rock when I think about what may have been public knowledge had I had the ability to post my emo ramblings before emo was even a social classification.
One summer during college, I actually set one of my journals on fire after reading through a documentation of my relationship with Min, my freshman-year boyfriend. Yeah. Not exaggerating. Flames. Scorched sink. Angry Mother.
I frequent a forum right now where I try to maintain an academic air, unlike certain other sites where my anger and sarcasm cannot be contained with the use of lower-case letters. Anyway, I linked my blog in my forum profile, but really only with the narcissistic hope that they would come to read my blog and realize I'm a little more interesting than my dry posts make me out to be.
So I checked my webstats today, and saw that a few IPs came to my site from that forum and immediately went to my Pictures section. I never thought I had reason to delete my picture archive, as that's really the part I like about most people's other blogs. I just like seeing what other people look like and how they take pictures of themselves. It's a type of art form to me.
But the fact that that someone came to my site knowing the person I am on the forums and saw the person pictured in that section, the majority of which are 5 years old, just made me wonder what kind of person they had pieced me together to be.
They start out with the average college cams -- tired from exams, fun exploits with friends -- then it moves to inside-joke theme cams from various websites, then moves into my awkward and regrettable...Eminem phase we'll call it, to finally some stand-up stuff. I haven't even updated the archives with my rare but more recent cam pictures in probably a year or more.
So where do I cut it off?
If I'm still blogging when I'm 40, do I keep my 21-year-old pictures up as "pictures of me"? Do I leave 19 years of blog archives up for the world to read, on the off-chance that someone (REALLY) bored could read some of the older stuff, and think that the things I said in the past are still how I feel at the present?
And I'm not even touching on perhaps one day wanting a career that looked down on people who, say, posted pictures of their Japanese figurine collection. Or maybe one day where I have a child who doesn't want to hear how I swore at some guy in the crowd of my stand-up show because he talked on his cellphone.
And the stuff I'm writing about now that I think is fine and an accurate portrayal of me -- maybe I'll be embarrassed that I used to make clay figurines of various "Star Trek" characters. Maybe I'll have wished I never made fun of Rachael Ray, because in the future we might be best friends, and then won't my face be red?
I just don't know. It's enough to scare someone away from blogging altogether, but...I just really enjoy doing it. Maybe people who want to be teachers and politicians and the pope just never get the inclination to join MySpace or the blogosphere, and that's just another reason they're perfect for what they want to do.
I guess I'll just have to wait and see how much my current self will embarrass my future self. And then when time machines are invented, I can travel back, fight myself to the death, and create a rip in the space/time continuum!
It's that last sentence that's gonna do all the future embarrassing, huh? Yeah.
I saw a show today wherein the participants were asked to name their most embarrassing moment. I tried to think of what mine would be, and I was surprised that I can't really think of it. Oh, I've done plenty of stupid things, but many were just faux pas. Nothing that would make a great story, or even an honorable mention in Seventeen magazine's Trauma-rama section.
I can, however, think of a few times I have gotten an absolutely horrible sinking feeling over something I'd done.
The first I can think of didn't sink in right away as to how much of an asshole I actually am. I was living in Switzerland at 15, my first time away from home for any time longer than a weekend, my first time alone outside of the country ever. I was, of course, pretty lonely, but we were kept busy to keep our minds off it. My best friend from back home, Kameron, took the time to send me a nice long letter, and if I remember correctly -- it was either her or my dear friend/current facebook stalker Allison ;) -- got most of the class to sign it, along with a sweet note.
No one else got such a letter in the whole 40-student program, and it really made me realize that I was missed and had great friends back home waiting for me.
So what did I do as thanks? Any long-time reader of this website may not be surprised to discover that I grabbed a red pen, corrected all her spelling and grammatical mistakes, and sent the letter back to her with a large "C+" at the top.
I probably thought it was hilarious at the time, but every time I think back on it, it makes me kind of sick to my stomach. Here was a 16-year-old girl who had the discipline to write and send a long letter to a foreign country, and I responded like a jerk. Ugh. Boo to me.
The second worst incident of my life came senior year in college.
Melissa had asked my boyfriend at the time, Sean, to go to her big sorority dance at the end of the year, her last senior year sorority shindig.
I had no problem with it, and I knew they would have a good time, but I hadn't ever committed the date to memory, as I had nothing to do with it at all.
And Sean, well, was a guy at the time (still is, or so I hear) and didn't really ever commit anything to memory, and just generally went where he was told.
The night before, Melissa and I were talking on IM, and she offhandedly told me to remind Sean to be ready at 7:00 or whatever. I, however, was having a fight with him about something at the time, and was probably reading some dumb website and only half paying attention to anything that was going on.
Not real productive when I'm fighting with someone.
You can see where this is going.
The next night, my roommates Sean, Chris, Sam, and I all went out to our favorite Thai restaurant for a fun weekend dinner. We got home, and I checked the answering machine.
It was like a movie. The room was dark, and my gut sank deeper and deeper as the different messages from Melissa played: "Okay, I'll be ready in a half an hour, so you can come on over anytime."
"I guess you're not picking up since you're on the way."
"We have to leave pretty soon."
"Okay, we're 10 minutes late now, but maybe if we speed..."
I was at least mature enough to know I had to call Melissa and face the music.
Okay, I'm lying. She called right as I was online booking a flight to Saudi Arabia.
No, this was my fault. I was supposed to remind Sean, and I didn't because I was mad at him. The next day, it was my idea to go out to dinner. And technically, I was supposed to have known about the date since the first time Melissa told me, which was probably months prior. (PS -- Sean helpfully agreed with Melissa and me that this was 100% my fault and didn't feel guilty about it for a nanosecond. Go team!)
There was no way to get there late, either, since, in an attempt to curb drinking and driving and prepartying, participants were only admitted off the sorority bus.
Melissa didn't let me have it as much as she could have, unlike nowadays where I get a lecture if I don't drive to her house to flip her mattress for her. I think I bought her Anastasia on DVD and some stuffed dog to try and make peace, but really it was probably the worst feeling I've ever had. Completely letting down someone I cared about on what was probably going to be a special night.
I still get nervous when people plan things way in advance, and I think probably a big reason I don't go out much here in LA is that my dinner plans often consist of, "I will be at this restaurant in 10 minutes if you want to meet me there."
I guess it's a good thing I wasn't on that show I watched, because all the other participants would probably have inched slowly away from me and tried not to get too close to me for the rest of the season.
I'll get back to you if I think of my most embarrassing moment.
Hopefully I can't remember it because it's just a hilarious part of my repertoire, and not because it's some terrible memory I've repressed, like slipping on a baby in front of a hot boy and some nuns or something.
And now it's time for another Good Idea, Bad Idea.
Good Idea:
Go to work, come home, relax, write blog posts, get lots of rest.
Bad Idea:
Work several 12-hour shifts multiple days in a row, peppering in a 16-hour shift, come home, write no blog posts, fantasize about death, and tear up during a particularly touching Windows Vista commercial due to lack of sleep. I SAID DUE TO LACK OF SLEEP.
-I wish I brought my camera with me all the time.
I just drove by a guy pounding on the door of a closing flower shop the day before Valentine's Day. Hilarious.
-This Valentine's Day, I am thankful to have a boyfriend with whom I can have an honest discussion about how to make the game rock-paper-scissors more interesting by making it robot-ninja-pirate.
-I think Final Fantasy 12 may be the coolest game I've played in a long time, and the Gambits are so fun to program.
-I am constantly getting ideas for Monk spec scripts I'd like to write, but they basically just come from me wishing I could kill various people and knowing I'd probably get away with it. (...if it weren't for you meddling kids.)
-I think I'm the only person on earth who has hope for the writers of Lost. Now, don't let me down!
-Someone needs to make a Harry Potter MMORPG. Get on that.
-Someone needs to unmake Butterfly Effect 2 and give me an hour and a half of my life back. I was sort of hoping that the twist ending would be Ashton Kutcher hopping out and saying we were punk'd into thinking the sequel would be a fraction as good as the original. I'll bet the studio execs wish they could travel back in time and make it so this movie was never green-lit...BUT AT WHAT COST?!?
-This week has been stressful, and I am creatively tapped.
Go here to read a big long list of boring crap about me.
The upside to having a boyfriend who loves to cook is, of course, getting to try a lot of great and interesting meals.
Well, great or interesting. Avocado ice cream was a neat thing to try, but I think I'll pass next time I need something to accompany a birthday cake. Unless the cake is made of tostidos with salsa frosting. Great, now I'm nauseous.
The downside to having a boyfriend who loves to cook is hearing the frigging Food Network behind you 24/7 when you're trying to concentrate on very important videos of cats pouncing on babies on the internet.
I'm sorry, but I have always vehemently insisted that I will only watch the Food Network if and when they then invent food replicators. It doesn't matter how many yum yum noises you make, Chairman Kaga, it's rude to eat in front of people.
I changed my mind slightly when I discovered "Good Eats" with Alton Brown, who I mistakenly continue to pronounce "All-ton" because I was taught German pronunciation. Now, that's a good cooking show because it is so damn informative. I was a baker for a bit back in Pittsburgh, and there was this hella long list of crap you had to do to make sticky buns, and I always asked everyone WHY you had to do these things because I knew it would help me remember. Then they gave me a blank look and sometimes fell over because I never mopped the floor because I hated my job because I was making sticky buns for a living.
So Alton's cool, but there are some others on that channel that really grind my gears.
Let's start with Rachael Ray. Besides looking at her man face every time I go to eat a Triscuit, I can't stand how she spins all of her meals into what a great girlfriend she is. It seems like all the shows I overhear are about how to cook that steak right so your guy won't leave you, or the perfect party dip for your hubby's poker night, or her special PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO ME, GOD, I LOVE YOU, CAN'T YOU TURN AWAY FROM THAT STUPID GAME FOR ONE SECOND, I HAVE A VAGINA Superbowl halftime souffle. AND STOP SAYING DELISH!
Phew. I have to calm down now. I'm all right.
Next, onto Paula Deen. If you don't know who she is, just switch to the Food Network and wait for a Grandmotherly woman shoving sticks of butter into other sticks of butter and serving it to her sons.
Now, it appears to me that to be on the Food Network, you obviously have to have some kind of personality and/or a strange accent of some sort. Rachael doesn't have one, I suppose, but that's because I haven't punched her in the mouth yet.
Paula has a southern drawl so pronounced that it would make Tennessee Williams want to change his name to North Dakota Williams.
Did that metaphor make any sense? No? Well, I tried.
When Justin watches her, I can never get any work done, because I'm constantly spinning around in my computer chair to mock her pronunciations of various common words. Now, I lived in the South for four years, and I sort of like it down there. They're relaxed, laid-back, and friendly. However, nowhere in the Southern dialect would it instruct you to pronounce the word "spatula" as "spachelor."
What the hell is a spachelor? A single male spatula? Should we all go to a spachelor party?
There is absolutely no excuse for someone in the food business to pronounce the most basic of utensils incorrectly and in a way that has nothing to do with your accent.
Which brings us to Emeril. Sure, good guy, whatever. I won't make fun of him too much for the same reasons I wouldn't make fun of Frank Sinatra or Joe Pesce, if you get my drift.
My beef with him is how he pronounces the word "stirring." He says "steering," which, again, has nothing to do with a thick New York accent. Where are you going to steer that soup? Into my mouth?
Whenever people pronounce things wrong, I always wonder if they're consistent across the board. For instance, would he pronounce a "heart murmur" as "heart meermeer"?
A heart meermeer sounds like an adorable creature that should be living in a manor on Animal Planet.
There are others, but I guess I can't fault them too much, since I already admitted that I myself mispronounce "Alton." On the other hand, I don't get paid to have a TV show where I pronounce Alton all day. I don't think it's too ridiculous to assume that at least once in chef school the head teacher chef used the words "spatula" and "stir," but perhaps Paula and Emeril were sick on those respective days.
And now, because Justin is asleep, I'm off to enjoy the zenith of my culinary talents, or as some people call them: Spaghetti-Os.
Well, Saturday was a productive day. It was very productive in making me want to kill myself.
I did my taxes using TurboTax, and instead of getting thousands of dollars like I usually do, I realized that I owe $400. Meaning I get to make the delightful decision of either stubbornly sticking to my number crunching and paying $400 or paying those heathen devils at H&R Block to "check" my work and possibly find an error, then charging me the amount I probably would be paying to the government anyway.
THEN, I had been saving up for an IRA, which requires a minimum of $3,000 to start up, but this pretty chunk of change has put me behind, and now I don't know when I will be in a position to maybe start one up again.
It doesn't help that I am also currently reading a book on personal finance that is absolutely making me insane and consider going Howard Hughes and locking myself in my room and only drinking bottled urine. Wait, that's what he did, right?
It just pisses me off. I don't spend lavishly. I almost never buy things for myself, and when I do, they're from Target. I've paid off my car and my student loans. I have a marginally good job, and I live in the cheapest town in Los Angeles. And I live paycheck to paycheck.
How do jerks out there own houses? How do they go out to fancy dinners and clubs 4, 5 times a week? How do they pay for trendy clothing, makeup, shoes, cigarettes, tanning, manicures?
YES, I HAVE A SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT, but who doesn't? There's a reason I'm pale, have no sense of fashion, and eat spaghetti for dinner 6 nights a week. I always thought I would be better off financially at the end of the day if I didn't tan, wore the same damn clothing I owned in high school, and didn't eat out if at all possible.
This post doesn't have a point, unless you know someone who would pay me for a kidney or something. I just needed to complain a little.