4 Childhood Embarrassments That Never Stop Being Shameful

We're taught from a pretty young age that your doodle is a private thing, and yet when you hit a swimming pool or work up a sweat, it's time to have a naked party with a room full of other dudes who are all flopping out like their clothes have evaporated. And while the sense of unease is awkward, it's the moment you get caught staring at a dong that the real embarrassment sets in.

Why would a kid stare at wang? Why do kids eat paint chips? You can't account for why a kid does anything. I once watched a kid on a bus eat his mother's lipstick. So, being surrounded by old man dink at the Y, it's no wonder that a kid might stare for a minute -- maybe one is all wonky and malformed, maybe his pube fro is more majestic than anything the kid has seen before, who's to say? But man, as an adult, it's a whole new ballgame, so to speak.

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This isn't innuendo for anything.

I have a really bad habit of staring off into space. Do this in a room full of naked guys and it seems like your glassy-eyed, slack-jawed expression has been brought on by an overwhelming sense of wiener admiration, and not every man is comfortable with that. Now you're forced to try to explain that you weren't staring at his junk, it's just that his junk ended up in your frame of view, and you were absently staring at a wall, thinking about blueberry cheesecake lube or whatever. There's no subtle way out of it, and it's so much worse than when you were a kid and could blame it on being sugar-addled or just stupid. Plus it means you need to go to a new gym now, and one day you'll run out of new ones.

The real issue here is the way our culture reacts to staring. How many times have you heard "Don't stare!" when you were growing up, or been made uncomfortable by someone else staring at you? Ever wonder why? Looking at people is not wrong, but it can be creepy to us. A woman wears a super low-cut top, you stare at her boobs, you're being a creep. I say fuck that. If I can see a thing when I'm out and about shopping for bagels and spray cheese, it's not my fault if I look at it. Don't tell me what to do with my eyes. And likewise, if you're insisting that I have to wash my dick in a room full of other dicks because somehow that is culturally normal, don't tell me it's not normal to see another dick. I'm going to look at every dick and tit that crosses my field of vision from now on, no matter how awkward it makes the dinner party.

When I was 11 years old, my unmarried and completely out of touch with reality aunt purchased me, for my birthday, a one-piece bathing suit that was yellow with red leaves patterned across it. I want you to imagine this for a moment -- imagine a child's one-piece bathing suit, in bright yellow, with realistic blood-red leaves all over it. Imagine those thin shoulder straps and the dip in the fabric across the back. Imagine the reinforced cotton gusset that I guess was meant to cradle my balls, since I was a boy (still am) and this was a bathing suit meant for a little girl. What the fuck?

My aunt assured my parents and me that this was not a girl's bathing suit, that men in Europe wore this style of suit all the time and it was meant to cover more skin so as to prevent sun damage and skin cancer. This may have been the first time my child's mind formed the thought "bullshit" with such fierce and precise sarcasm that, had I unleashed it verbally, it may have drawn blood. It was bad enough that I had a habit of staring at dicks in the shower at the pool, I didn't need to be wearing a girl's bathing suit while I did so.

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And now for eveningwear!

The fact is, clothing purchased by relatives is a terrible speed bump in your road to independence. It's like being a dog that gets dressed by a rich celebutante who doesn't understand what animal abuse actually is. You know you look stupid, but what's to be done about it?

Once adulthood comes around, you feel like you may have escaped this trap of dressing like an idiot. Instead, it becomes a more finely honed experience of embarrassment wherein your relatives, now totally out of touch with you and your style, buy you things like sweatpants that you and a friend could fit in, because probably you're fatter than they remember, and hoodies featuring wolves. Do you have any idea how many sweaters I own that feature wolves, elk, and cougars? I'm like Walker, Texas Ranger's fashion fucktarded cousin. They hang in my closet for years on end until I have enough to bag up for the Goodwill, and even then I know they look at me with judgment in their eyes for presuming to give such ugly-ass sweaters to the poor and thrifty as though they had no taste whatsoever.

Everyone has that one friend. Maybe you are that friend. I might be, I write about eating lube. In general, though, it's the friend you fall back on when all else fails and solitude might drive you to madness. When I was a kid, this friend lived down the street and had parents who looked identical. They wore the same glasses and got their hair cut the same all the time. They both looked like birds and would stare at me with pursed lips as though someone had just rimmed their little puckers with a lemon. The whole family was six kinds of fucked, but he was the only kid my age within six blocks, and for a time that basically meant he was my cellmate in prison, minus the gross things you just thought. I was a kid, stop being sick.

Nine times out of 10, this kind of friendship would be unremarkable, because 9 times out of 10, any given person is going to be functionally normal. This kid wasn't. He once invited me over to watch him play Super Nintendo (I foolishly thought I might get a turn) and proceeded to shit himself after about an hour, completely without shame, on the grounds that he was home anyway so he had clothes to change into when he was done playing and needed to clean up. What kind of logic is that? What series of checks and balances is your brain going through when you think, "Well, I could stop playing Mario to evacuate my bowels, but doesn't that mean Bowser wins? No, best to play through the rumble, and since I'm already at home base, I can scour the shit pancake I'm currently embedding into my drawers free with, I dunno, my toothbrush and a photo of my dead grandpa."

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"Someone help me take a dick pic!"

When you're a kid, you realize at some point that this isn't cool, and you start avoiding that friend. Problem is, you'll make a new friend one day when you're older, never realizing they were that kid someone else unfriended years ago for being batshit insane. And now, as adults, you have the added bonus of maturity to taint your fear, revulsion, and embarrassment when this friend decides to make a toast at a mutual friend's wedding by dinging the champagne flutes with his penis, or maybe charm some hot new person you're talking to by attempting to fart the alphabet in front of them.

Whenever this friend humiliates you, part of you recognizes that it shouldn't, because after all, it's not you doing it. But part of you also knows that everyone is looking at the two of you like you're conjoined twins and you're clearly responsible for your chimp-like friend's behavior.

The worst thing in the world is a beautiful woman with a child, if you're that child. It's probably awesome to literally everyone else. A beautiful woman sounds great, motherhood is wonderful, what's not to love? Ask the kid. Ask him. Ask him when he's 16 years old.

Aside from being from a war-torn country or suffering from a flesh-eating disease, the worst thing that can happen to a male from the mid-teens on through his 30s or so is having a hot mom, because your hot mom will be noticed by every guy friend you have, and some of their fathers, and your teachers, and your co-workers, and the mailman, and the neighbors, and every guy ever. The hotter your mom, the more embarrassing this becomes for the child.

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"Do your homework. Mommy's gotta work off some rent."

When you're a child, a hot mom can be embarrassing if she really embraces her hotness and is a bit flirty. You don't want to see that. You expect your mom to be making casserole and forcing you to vacuum on weekends. When you're fully old enough to understand sex, your hot mom is 1,000 times worse through no fault of her own, thanks to every friend you have that you now realize is an asshole when they talk about her boobs and ass as though those things didn't make your own boner shrivel like a slug in a salt shaker. The day you realize that it's entirely possible one of your friends has jerked off thinking about your mom is the day you fold your childhood up like a flag and place it on the coffin of your innocence.

The idea that your mother is possessed of sexuality at all is something most kids never want to acknowledge. As an adult, you'll come to terms with this, even if it grosses you out, but it will likely never stop giving you the heebie-jeebies, because of all the things moms need to do in life, stimulating boners is not one of them. But you'll know she does. And worse, there's all the retroactive boners you never knew about in your childish state of wonder that will one day occur to you when you're old enough to suddenly get the jokes and innuendoes you heard for all those years that never made sense at the time. And they're still happening. Someone, right now, has a boner for your mom. Someone always has a boner for your mom.