How embarrassing...

Have you ever been so embarrassed that you think the only possible solution is to go hide in the woods somewhere for the next few decades until everyone you know is either dead or has forgotten about you?

That's pretty much how I feel right now. Someone I knew during my high school years has suddenly made a sort of brief re-entrance into my life, and so with that comes a whole slough (or is it slew?) of embarrassing moments that I'm suddenly remembering. I thought I had done a pretty decent job of converting horrifically embarrassing moments into future cancer-inducing repressed memories, but aparently I was wrong. Because I'm getting flooded with embarrassing moments.

I'm not talking about stupid moments like:

1) Like the time I pissed my pants on my front porch when I was 12. (I was out walking the dog, the door was locked.....and I had to go real bad.)

2) Like the time I got pantsed in front of a supermarket, except the friend who pantsed me also managed to bring my underwear down with it....and I ended up mooning an old lady.

3) Like the time I accidentally corrected a girl with a lisp on her pronunciation when she said "Lassen" as "Lashen" (being physically incapable of saying "Lassen")

4) Like the fact that I was a cheerleader in middle school.

5) Like the time I took a nap onstage before a show, and I woke up and found out that the red paint on the stage had rubbed off onto my butt in such a way that it looked like I had "perioded" myself, except I didn't realize it until one of the actors (I was the lighting designer) pulled me aside and asked if I needed a tampon.

6) Like the fact that at age 8 I was playing a dog in a play, and all I had to do was bark. And during the climactic scene of "Annie," I was supposed to bark a lot but I suddenly forgot how to bark....so I simply let out short blood-curdling screams instead of barks.

7) Like the fact that at age 9 I was playing a BRICK in a play, and I had to wear a bright yellow UNITARD, along with a cardboard brick attached to my head. That's right, I'll say it again: I wore a fucking unitard. On a fucking stage. And it was a yellow unitard. And, G-d help me, we have pictures of it.

8) Like the fact that we also have this gem of a picture from 6th grade:



9) Like pretty much any other moment of my childhood.

No, that's NOT what I'm talking about. At least for these moments, while horrifically embarrassing at the time, I can laugh about now. I'm talking about moments that, even almost a decade later, cause me to cringe and say to myself, "WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING, SAM?!" Moments that are so horrifically embarrassing that I sometimes question if I'll ever be fit for human company.

I noticed that a lot of my unbearably embarrassing moments (the moments that I won't be describing on this blog) have almost without fail arisen from situations in which I went against my natural instincts/desires in an attempt to do what I thought was socially expected or normal, and ended up failing miserably. I guess the moral of the story is, Be Yourself. Or maybe, Learn how NOT to fuck up socially expected situations.