When I was little, a friend and I were at a basketball court playing horse. Two teenagers came up to us and asked if we wanted to play a real game 2 on 2. I had never actually played a game of basketball up to that point but agreed anyway.

One of the older kids took the ball, passed it to me and said "check." I thought he said "chuck" so I threw the ball as hard as I could over a neighboring fence and into someone's backyard. One of the older kids laughed and said, "You don't know how to play basketball do you?"

All I could do was hang my head in embarrassment. I'm 34 years old now and still think about that from time to time and wonder what in the world I was thinking.

Prom night. Picked up my date and drove back home because mom wanted to take pictures. Went to introduce my date to mom and said, "Mom, this is my date... um... " Yeah. I forgot her name.

At least I remembered mom's name when I introduced her to my date.

Right after the movie Titanic came out, I decided it would be a great time to explore my singing career. I refused to sing in front of my entire family being a shy child, so one by one I brought them into my room, closed the door, and proceeded to belt out what I thought were the lyrics to My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion. I still cringe thinking about how awkward it was

There was also interpretive dancing involved.

I was obsessed with trying to be "manly" when I was 13. One day at gym, a kid accidentally hit me in the face with a basketball, hard enough to knock me down. Well, the fall split the back of my head open (bone was fine, just the skin) and the basketball to the face implanted my braces inside of my front lip.

So I stand up, blood leaking down the back of my shirt and out of my mouth, and tears streaming down my face. And I try to convince every one staring at me that I'm fine, and no I'm not crying. Then I tried to swagger out of the gym, panicked when the teacher tried to stop me, and ran out with the portly gym teacher chasing after me. Out of everything, the attempted swagger is what makes me cringe.

Debbie, with spray-on jeans and pouting lips. I didn't stand a chance, and I did what any smitten teen would do - I made her a mixtape on a C90 cassette. Overtaken by hormones and the fiery desires of my loins, I decided to put in a short - and, in retrospect, decidedly sad, spoken word poem halfway through side two. The gist of it was this: "Debbie, I want to see you with very few clothes on."

I gave her a few days to let the message - mixed together with my irresistible choice of 80s New Rom standards - sink in, before giving her a call: "Hey Debbie, did you listen to that tape I made you?"

"I didn't have time. I gave it to my brother... He's in the air force. I thought it would be nice to give him something to listen to in his barrack room."

Meanwhile, at an airforce base somewhere, a battered ghetto blaster plays. Perched on top of the machine is a cassette box, bearing the words "Debbie's Mix Tape Vol. 1". Half a dozen finely-creased and frighteningly muscular young men - some of whom are openly displaying wispy pencil moustaches - sit open-mouthed, hanging on to every last, pathetic word of my poem, their fingers tightening over a variety of semi-automatic weapons.

"...and Debbie, as the band plays on, we can make sweet, sweet music of our own..."

I never spoke to her again.

When I was around maybe 4 years old, I was learning to ride a bike. When I got the grasp of it I never stopped riding it. One time during the summer we were having a really warm day (It's normally cold where I live) so naturally I went out on my bike. But this time I guess I was so excited that I went out naked. My friends laughed insanely as I rode down the hill. I was so embarrassed that I didn't ride my bike for a few weeks after that.

My face still gets all screwed up when I think about it.

I asked a girl out in the hall after class one day, some girl that I had never even talked to before but thought was kind of cute. I gave her my number on a piece of paper and said to call me in this weird awkward manner, then I walked to my car (it was the last class of 11th grade) and looked in the rear view mirror. I immediately noticed that I had a GIANT booger hanging like an inch out of my nose. She never called.

Back in 8th grade, I had just come back from lunch break and was sitting down for science class. Had been holding in a fart for a few minutes and wasn't too worried about it. Then the urge to sneeze struck and before you know it, I was sitting in the middle of the class - everyone silent, and every pair of eyes on me - as I came to the terms with the fact that I had just done the loudest public fart known to man.

Of course, I tried to cover it up by saying, "What? Why are you all staring at me?" Teacher even helped me out by shifting attention away, god bless her soul.

I still have nightmares to this day.

I was like 7 at this big church my family used to go to and I'd got called up to be on stage with some other kids. Pastor was just being funny, asking questions before going on to the game or whatever we had come up for. He said I looked like a guy who could moonwalk and I was like "nah, nah."

Then when he turned around I did it... except I didn't know what moonwalking was, so I took these like big steps and acted like I was walking on the moon. He turned around and was like "did you do it?" and I was like "yeah" and everyone was laughing and I felt great.

But now it's one of those things that keeps me up at night. I didn't realize my mistake until I was like 17 and it just continues to kill me.

I have so many of them I don't know where to start. My parents love to tell the story about how my mom walked in on me and a neighbor boy in the living room - I was casually drawing at the coffee table and the other kid underneath the table sucking on my toes. I didn't mind to be honest, in fact I think I was actually enjoying it? Hard to remember, I was maybe 5 or 6.

So mom is understandably very uncomfortable, and goes to fetch his dad, who is clearly mortified. Dad bodily picks the kid up, face is purple, and mutters about how his kid "has a thing about feet" on the way out.

When I was in 5th grade, the teacher showed us the code of conduct video from the school board. One of the main things they emphasized was dress code and at the end of the video they would have a dress code fashion show with high school kids in it.

Now my class was watching this video and we get to the point in the video where they are doing the fashion show. This kid walks out and he has some pretty cool looking jewelry on. Then I, a little scrawny Chinese boy with a bowl cut, say "I like his bling-bling." Nobody else remembers it but I remember it vividly and cringe every time.

I was in 7th grade and it was a few minutes before class, so everyone was just talking to each other about normal middle school things. One of my friends drops a pencil and it rolls under a few desks in front of him, so he starts to crawl on the ground to pick it up. For some dumb reason, I felt the sudden urge to just slap his butt as hard as I could. So I did...and the whole room just went silent. Everyone, including the teacher was staring at me.

Then after about 6 long seconds, a girl in the class asks "did you just slap his butt?"

I honestly had no idea what to say, probably because I just slapped my friend's behind out of nowhere, so I just stuttered out "uhh..uhh...yes?"

And then the teacher just says, "Well... okay let's start class" and the whole classroom just busted out in laughter.

To this day I still wonder why my brain thought it would a good idea to play random slap-butt.

When I was really young, I was reading a book about helping the environment, something like "50 Ways to Save the Earth", and I learned that a significant portion of the fresh, drinkable water we use winds up getting wasted in the toilet. I naturally interpreted this as meaning water in the toilet is perfectly drinkable.

So one time I was eating a piece of gum while doing my business (just #1, which somehow makes me feel better) and, after flushing the toilet, I'm pulling my pants up or whatever and my gum falls out of my mouth and directly into the toilet. Remembering my environmental factoid and given that I'd just flushed, I nonchalantly fish it out and just keep chewing.

Not only this, I think I've been clever so I go outside to where my parents are hosting a party for some family friends and I tell everyone I picked my gum out of the toilet but it's ok because the water is TOTALLY drinkable.

Not quite quickly enough, my parents take me aside and explain that the water is drinkable, you know, BEFORE it gets into your actual toilet bowl and that I probably shouldn't be bragging about this. It probably took a while to earn back any respect I had among those present that day.

Growing up, I was raised in a SUPER health food oriented house. My parents refused to send me to school with "cool" lunch snacks like a cookie or chips, it was always a banana. An apple if they were in a crazy mood.

I was in fourth grade and discovered that I could steal from other kids' lunch boxes. Lunch boxes were in the coat room off the side of the class. I had done it once or twice, grabbed a bag of chips or a cookie and scarfed it down, revelling in the taste of forbidden junk food.

Then one day, my teacher asked what I was doing in the coatroom. I was already halfway through a bag of Doritos. Instead of coming clean or just flat out lying, I tried to keep walking deeper in there, as though something was at the end of it besides a wall.

Twenty years later, I still think back to how humiliating it was to get caught in front of the entire class as the lunch time bandit and how stupid I must have seemed trying to hide once already spotted.

In fourth grade my mom took me back to the school after hours because she had some PTO meeting or something of the sort. With my boredom peaking, a brilliant idea popped into my head. I claimed that I needed to get something out of my desk in my classroom, and was allowed to go grab it - which gave me a few seconds in the classroom all by myself.

When I got into the room, I immediately grabbed a piece of paper and wrote “I love you Kelsie!” and placed it in Kelsey’s desk, the girl I’d had a crush on and had never spoken to, and left.

Next day - I get into the classroom and everyone is surrounding Kelsey’s desk. They are trying to figure out who wrote the letter - so naturally I play along and try to decipher the handwriting to figure out this mystery crush who couldn’t even spell her name right.

Worst (or best) part was that my teacher knew that I was in the room by myself the day before. She never gave me up, but I know she knew.

I was on the bus to school and started not feeling too good, and the guy sitting next to me told me I looked pale. Next thing I knew I threw up all over the seat back in front of me, oatmeal from breakfast everywhere. When I was done puking my brains out I looked over at my neighbor and delivered a legendary one liner:

“Well, that’s what I had for breakfast!”

He moved to the seat next to me.

One Christmas when I was about 5/6ish years old, I was in line at the mall to sit on Santa's lap. I decided that I wanted to give him money to go towards feeding the reindeer, and since I was 5/6 that money was basically a handful of nickels and dimes and probably a couple pennies. Not much maybe like 40 to 50 cents in change.

My turn came up and I sat on Santa's lap, and I tried to hand him the money but it fell out of my hand... and right down onto Santa's crotch. I dove right in there trying to pick up the money with my little boy hands and Santa hastily said (very hastily): "Oh, ho, ho, it's okay. I'll get it later." And put my on the ground to send me on my way.

So, yeah, I touched Santa Claus's junk, and indeed, it still haunts me to this day.

My cleaning/day-care lady got me a sweater on my 12th birthday and all I said was: "Is that all?" She got a bit sad and said that it was all she could afford to get me.

She died of cancer when I was 15 and I didn't get a chance to say how sorry I am because I wasn't mature enough. I hope it wasn't as much of a big deal for her as it later became for me.

I was a spoiled brat and couldn't appreciate a gift she wasn't obliged to spend her money on. It is the thing that embarrasses me the most to this day because that is where I failed myself. I behaved like a jerk and not a human being.

Since then I am trying my best to appreciate every little thing someone does for me regardless of how big or small it is. Let this be my way to say I'm sorry.

There was this one guy in geometry that was constantly making fun of me. One day, after I couldn’t take it any more, I pulled out my phone and acted like I was talking to snipers who were trained to follow around people who had been mean to me.

I still cringe myself into a ball whenever I think about it.

A little more information: I was like 15 or 16 at the time. Way older than I should have been for this level of idiocy. I told the kid that I have people following him, and that he should lay off... OR ELSE. He laughed in my face. Oh and it was in front of a group of people as well, so they all thought I was a dweeb.

I was the master of blatant lies in about 1st grade, prolly one of my earliest memories. I had to be cool so I found a decently cool looking rock out behind my house. Brought it to show and tell and told the whole class I found it floating whilst on a cruise in the ocean. Couldn't understand the laughter.

So I doubled down, and took one of those little animal pendants from McDonalds that came out for the power rangers movie (I think it was the mammoth or something) that came in the Kids Meal, and tried to tell the whole class that my great grandfather had carved it before his passing. I was instantly called out and told to sit down.

I was, and continue to be, an absolute loser...

When I was 11/12, if I had a crush on someone, I would go find their parents in the phone book, look up the phone number on white pages, find their address, and then in an attempt to impress them I would REPEAT BACK TO THEM THEIR PARENTS' NAMES, HOME PHONE NUMBER, AND ADDRESS.

I was literally a serial stalker and for some reason no one ever reported me.

I'm a girl so that's probably why no one thought it was that creepy, but no I do not still do this, and yes I understand it's completely unacceptable. Middle school me was peak cringe, but I've moved on.

I'm 39 and I still think about my first almost kiss, it was so awkward and embarrassing.

I was 11 or 12 and at camp, we were playing spin the bottle. I was a really naive little girl and didn't quite understand what I was getting myself into.

The bottle landed on me and I stood up to kiss the older and far more experienced boy in front of me.

I essentially unhinged my jaw and opened up my mouth really wide to kiss him.

He stepped back and took one look and me and said "no."

When I was like 7 or 8, I was staying over at a friend's for a sleepover. I had to go to the bathroom late at night but it was down a super creepy dark corridor and was too spooked. Friend suggested I pee in one of his baby brother's diapers and I was so desperate that I did.

His mom came in to find me holding a soaked diaper with pee all over the floor while he was laughing hysterically. I want to die every time it comes back to me, which is at least twice a week.

I liked this boy in my art class and found out through some mutual friends that he lived a few blocks from me. So instead of just talking to him at school like a sane person would I decided I'd get his attention by sneaking out of my house at 4am with a big bag of garbage, walking all the way to his house, throwing the garbage all over his lawn, then ringing his doorbell and running back home.

The next day at school I asked him if anything weird happened at his house last night. When he said yeah, I revealed that I was the one who "pranked" his family last night. He just awkwardly said, "Oh... okay." He didn't talk to me for a few months after that. What in the world was I thinking?

The worst part is I was nearly 14.

Oh god. When I was like 7 or 8, a friend of my parents had a baby. They already had a 4-year-old girl too. My dad and I were watching as the other dad showed the 4-year-old how to change a diaper.

I had recently seen the first Austin Powers movie.

So I said, in my infinite wisdom, “does that make you randy baby, yeaaaaaah,” as the four-year-old girl was wiping her baby sister.

My dad was mortified. In hindsight, so am I.

I was at a sleepover in middle school. I had gotten new pyjamas and everything. I was so excited because I really wanted to be friends with these girls.

Woke up in the middle of the night, only to find I had wet myself. I had to sneak into her sister's room where we put our bags to find a change of pants. All I had were jeans. When everyone woke up I told them I got cold...

My mom told me I smelled when I got in the car to go home. I told her their beagle smelled bad and slept with me all night.

My mom and dad had a lot of pet names for each other -- “Honey, pumpkin, lovey, etc.” -- and I loved to play dress up pretending to be my mom and imitate the things she said.

One night, when they thought I was sleeping, I overheard my parents arguing and she called him a “rat b......”. Never having heard this, I thought it was a made up love word like “pookie.”

My dad comes to pick me up from daycare maybe a week later. I’m playing house. He comes in and, still playing a mom, I scream for all my classmates and their parents to hear, "How was your day, rat b......?"

I was in high school and asked a teacher if she was a member of the Mile High Club in front of the class.

I had never flown before and was not aware that the Mile High Club was for people who had done it in a plane. I was thinking about the memberships where you sit in private rooms to wait for your plane and get free things.

Basically wanted to die of shame afterward. Yes she was attractive, no she did not answer.

When I was a kid I used to watch TV with my parents, and I watched a couple french kiss. Being little, I thought that was how you were supposed to kiss everyone. So later my mom asked for a kiss from me, and I tried to french kiss her. I sometimes think that I should have been in the special class.

Growing up my parents reeeally wanted to make sure I wouldn't smoke -- most of my grandparents passed from smoking-related illnesses, so this is understandable. Except they drilled it in my head a little too hard.

One day in kindergarten a classmate was absent. The next day she was there, and she was super sad. We asked her what happened, and she said that her grandma died of lung cancer.

I told her it served her right. The teacher was not pleased.

I apologized the next day as well as a five-year-old could, but damn if that hasn't stuck with me since.

I'd like to think my empathy skills have improved over the years.

When I was in kindergarten waiting outside to be picked up by my mom, I saw her approaching. I closed my eyes and ran at her and hugged her. Opened my eyes and I apparently I had not aimed correctly as I was hugging the wrong woman. One of my classmates yelled at me to “stop hugging their mom”.

I still think about it.

I was in primary school (6th grade I believe) and I would've been about 11 at the time. One day the vice-principal was having an intense discussion in his classroom during lunch break. He seemed to be acting as a mediator to sort out a conflict between a group uncomfortable looking kids who were all standing around him. I happened to be using one of the computers in the room nearby and listened in curiously as I overheard bits of whatever drama was unfolding between them.

To this day I have no freaking idea what came over me, but for some reason I decided it was appropriate to walk over, lean down and slam my palms on the teacher's desk like I owned the place, say "So, what's going on here?" and look around at each of them expectantly like they were actually about to recount the story to me in its entirety.

The vice-principal was this stern older guy who was not the type to be messed with. He just looked at me with the most incredulous look on his face for a couple of seconds and blinked.

"Wha-.... NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS!"

Everyone stared at me in silence for several seconds and I walked off sheepishly.

I still have no idea what came over me that day, this was not normal behaviour for me. I still cringe about it occasionally.

One time in sixth grade, my teacher said "It's not over till the fat lady sings." I, in my boundless wisdom, immediately turned around and yelled "sing!" at our assistant teacher, who was only slightly large in the way people tend to get as they age. I still think about it and wish I could slap myself before it happened.

When I was around 5 or so I used to go to the side of my house with a shovel to poop. Now you might be thinking I dug a hole a poop in it. I wish. I would defecate onto the shovel and then fling it over the gate, onto the street. I remember eventually getting caught and having a very awkward talk with my parents.

When I was about 7 or 8, my dad had custody of me and my sister every other weekend. My mom would drop us off with him Fridays, and he'd always take us to this nice shopping area where we'd go buy some Babysitters Club books and have dinner. We always parked in the same parking garage, and I always ran ahead three floors down the stairwell because I liked to hide underneath the stairs and jump out and yell "boo!" when I would hear my dad and sister start coming down the last flight.

Only, one time I did it, and it wasn't my dad and my sister at all. It was an elderly couple who must have entered on a lower level ahead of my family. They had to be in their seventies. The woman gasped and clutched her chest and they almost fell down the stairs. I thought she was having a heart attack. I was MORTIFIED.

I don't even really remember what I said to them. My dad apologized to them, and then he and my sister proceeded to make fun of me for years. That was almost 30 years ago now, and my face STILL gets all hot from even thinking about it.

My mom walked in on my boyfriend and I hooking up. That's not the mortifying part. The embarrassing, I still haven't lived this down part was she fully transformed into the Hulk! She seriously lunged at my boyfriend, threw him on the floor and literally chased him out of the house without his clothes.

Before this moment my mother absolutely adored my boyfriend thinking he was a "good Christian boy with wonderful morals"... After this she still refers to him as "the liar who stole her baby's precious innocence"...

I was 17 and he was not my first.

In middle school we were doing presentations over basic stuff about different diseases. Just general stuff like symptoms, who's most likely to get it, etc.

My group got diabetes, so we got to work figuring it out. We kinda just got the basic idea that you get diabetes from eating a bunch of sugar so it's only fat people who have it... I don't think I understood type 1 back then (I barely do now).

So, we thought it would be an absolute riot if we made fun of fat people with diabetes in our presentation. So with each of us having huge crap eating grins on our faces during our presentation, I hit the clicker to go to the next slide and it's just full of morbidly obese people.

I'm like, "And this is what a person with diabetes looks like." I was excepting a huge roar of laughter, but everyone just sat there for what seemed like years. Our teacher didn't do anything, I think she was in shock. Then one girl just said, "That's not funny, my dad has diabetes." And we shut the presentation off and sat down.

I wanted to freaking die.

I pooped my pants in the 1st grade while playing Monopoly on the last day of school before summer break.

My teacher kept telling me to hold on when I tried to ask to go to the bathroom.

Long story short; while we were all on the floor playing Monopoly I pooped so hard it lifted me two inches off the ground. It was so bad I got sent home for the day.

I still think about it cause I’m unsure if I couldn’t hold it in any longer or if I did it to spite my teacher. Either way it was super embarrassing.

I hid from my mother in Macy’s or something when I was like 7. I thought I was being so funny as I jumped into different clothes racks.

I remember the staff looking for me too and I hid inside a long jacket as they came by. I was sneaking around for about 20 minutes or so and I remember making my way back to my mom when I found a security guard talking to her as she started to get upset. He said something like, “From what we can tell he’s still in the store, he has been running between the coat racks hiding from everyone.”

That’s when she burst out in tears. She yelled my name and I popped out right behind her and said, “You got me!” She turned around and grabbed me, gave me a huge hug. I will never forget the face the security guard gave me when she hugged me. It was like, “Yikes, you stupid kid, you’re in big trouble when you get home.”

It never occurred to me that my mother may have thought that I got kidnapped...

20 years later and I’m still the best at hide and seek.

I was sleeping over at a friend's house. I got my period early and woke up and there was a bit of blood on the sheets. So when she went to take a shower, I pulled off the fitted sheet, turned it around, and put it back so it was on her side of the bed. The idea was she'd think it was her own fault. (We slept in same bed together.)

I don't know why I didn't just tell her the truth and clean it off.

Went on my first date at around 13 to Finding Nemo with a girl and her friend when it first came out in theatres. Ate a bunch of popcorn with a huge soda and ended up sitting through the last 30 minutes of the movie having to pee so, so bad.

Being an awkward early teen, I didn't want to get up and awkwardly crawl through the packed movie theater so I just endured the pain. Afterwards, I ran to the packed bathroom and waited in line behind a ton of other men awkwardly for a urinal. Finally, one opened up in my line and I rushed up to it only to realize that the base of it was at my crotch level, so I basically had to pee upwards to get it in the urinal.

I had to pee so bad and felt so awkward about the whole situation that I started peeing but didn't want to be even more weird and look down at where I was peeing in front of all the other men waiting to go. So... I just kinda stood on my tiptoes and stared at the wall, initially getting it in the bowl but then becoming unaware of where my pee was going.

I ended up spraying the front of the urinal, getting my entire lower front covered in pee bouncing off the contaminated surface, and soaking the floor and probably the guy's feet next to me. Upon finishing my giant pee, I realized the trouble I was in as I had to meet my date and her friend outside the bathroom. I also had to walk past the line of guys waiting to use the urinal behind me.

I ended up rapidly pretending to spray myself with water at the sink and then walked out with my sweatshirt on, but with my hands in the front pockets stretching it down, trying to cover up my crotch and upper thighs. I rapidly said bye without a hug and hopped in the front seat of my mom's minivan and rode home smelling like pee. It was awkward.

Had a sleepover at a girl’s house where she shared a bedroom with her younger brother with bunk beds. I was probably about 12 or 13 and unfortunately was one of those kids that still had “accidents”.

Middle of the night I realize I had one and completely soaked her brother’s mattress. I was mortified and couldn’t bring myself to tell her mom (who kinda scared me), so I cleaned myself up and put on my regular clothes. I hid my soaked nightshirt and being the genius I was, I found clean sheets and flipped the mattress thinking that will surely hide the evidence.

It didn’t. He went around telling everyone and though her and I remained friends, I was never invited to sleep over there again.

My signature look as a teen was black chunky boots, black pants, black tank top, a black hoodie, those arm things from Hot Topic (black, of course) with a wallet chain, fedora, and a "face design" that I drew in black eyeliner, usually going from the corner of my left eye to the middle of my cheek.

I dressed like a Nice Guy^TM as a 13 year old girl.

So, I grew up in Indonesia where people middle class and above typically had maids so I grew up assuming everyone had maids. Moved to Singapore where it's more of an upper middle-class and above thing.

Thought a great rallying cry to unite people against crappy cafeteria food was, "Even my maids eat better than this!"

I was in a play in middle school and had the romantic lead, I was supposed to kiss the girl, who was very cute. I was very embarrassed. During rehearsals the boys' basketball team was watching from the door to the gym, laughed and offered to take my place. Later put on the play before the whole school, I faked the kiss, pretty sure everyone knew I faked it. She certainly did.

At school, about 14, having an assembly, a giant one with about 500 students. We all had chairs, my chair is placed next to the aisle-gap in the middle.

We stand up when the headmaster (it was a UK school) walks in. During this brief period of standing, the jerk behind me takes my chair and passes it behind him. That idiot does the same and soon my chair is at the very back of the hall. All 500 people sit down, I at least notice and don’t fall on my arse but I am left with a predicament. I was a massive unpopular bag of awkward and anxiety at school, so I decided the best solution was to hover. Pretend I have a chair.

This worked for about five minutes before I wobbled and the headmaster boomed, “[Surname], where is your bloody chair?” I was terrified of speaking so just pointed to the back of the hall. All the other kids were laughing and he made me go and get it. That was the longest walk ever. My toes curl jus thinking of it.

I got caught by my mom, sister, brother, and best friends little sister trying to screw the vacuum cleaner. I was 13.

I had a habit of walking around in a towel for WAAAAYYYYY too long after showers. So obviously, one day after school, I'm standing at the top of the stairs talking to my mom about something then….BAM! Towel falls to the ground , in front of mom, in front of sister behind mom, in front of judging cat, in front of portrait of Grandmother, in front of the almighty mighty Lawrd looking down upon me laughing his sandals off!!!

Moral of the story: towels are cool, but don't be a fool; don't be wearing your towel long after at school.

Late teenage years, 18 to be exact.

Some friends and I had all agreed to rent out a house together, 3 storey place, 6 bedrooms so one each and a large communal room downstairs that we used as a garage for our motorbikes. Yep, all rufty tufty bikers, long tatty hair, the beginnings of my now magnificent (and greying) beard. Hard as nails, bad to the bone, was the image we were projecting...

So, I'm vacuuming up in my room. It's earlyish in the morning and I put the radio on. A few minutes in, the Pet Shop Boys' "Left To My Own Devices" came on.

Dunno why it affected me like so at the time, but I went through a full on song and dance routine to this with the vacuum, pirouetting, crouches, OTT vocals, the whole deal. A hairy bearded diva, right there with the vacuum cleaner.

I never realized the door to my room was open, lost in the bewitching dream of camp pop stardom as I was. I finished my housework and only then noticed a couple of my housemates practically dying with laughter. They had been watching me for the entire performance.

Nearly 25 years later I still get the skin ripped off of me for that. Don't care. Pet Shop Boys are my not-so secret guilty pleasure.

When I was 13, I thought somehow that my window blinds made me invisible. I decided if I turned them a certain way, I could see out, but nobody could see in.

We lived in an apartment, and a family with some kids my age moved in next door. They were dorks, but they were the only other kids.

One day the family was leaving to go somewhere, and I stood at my window with my blinds tilted to invisibility mode. I suddenly started doing this primal dance that involved vigorously flipping off the family and mooning them, I was really into it - I was throwing some hard middle fingers and butt at them.

I look back out and see the whole family stopped, and they're staring at me; mom, dad, kids, all watching me dancing with my butt out and flipping them off.

I can remember the shocked frozen horror on all of their faces. My knees buckled and I fell to the ground, where I hid until I heard them leave. Once I knew it was clear, I ran to their position to confirm my suspicions...

They saw everything.

I wore short-shorts in fourth grade.

Also, I'm a guy.

See, there was this girl I had a huge crush on in school. She was brilliant and beautiful and just great. So, me being in fourth grade, I took my cues on how to impress girls from television. The problem was, for some reason I never took the cues from the men on TV... I took it from the women.

So, I would wear these extremely tight fitting shorts that kept on getting smaller and smaller as I continued to grow. I must have worn these shorts twice a week for six months, thinking this girl was really enjoying my tight butt.

Then one day I was walking past the girl and her friends and I could feel their eyes on me. I felt cool and hot and wanted... only for me to round the corner to hear them burst into laughter. I stopped and listened as they mocked my tight short-shorts.

And that's when I knew that short-shorts weren't really going to win that girl's heart.

Pfft. No regrets. I looked fabulous, Audrey. You hater.

My mom took my brother and I to the circus when I was about 5 or 6. We got slushie drinks during the circus that were pretty frozen. Trying to break up a big piece of ice I jammed the straw to the bottom of the styrofoam cup putting a hole in the bottom and getting cherry slushie all over me. I started to cry when everybody was quiet watching the the tightrope walker do his thing.

Here I am screaming, covered in red stuff and a spotlight shines on me. A lot of people gasped thinking something really bad was happening. They stopped the show for a few minutes. The only thing more red than my shirt was my mom's face. I still think about that from time to time, and call my mom to apologize sometimes when I've had a few too many drinks.

Finally, my time to shine. I was at boy scout camp. 13 years old. About ten of us were standing in the shallow end of the pool. The adult instructor was standing at the edge and was attempting to show us a technique to lift someone in distress out of the pool by holding on to their wrists and bouncing them off the bottom to pull them out. He made me be a volunteer to demonstrate the technique to everyone else.

So the instructor, while standing outside the pool, was to bounce me off the bottom to pull me out. When he pulled me up the down force was so strong it pulled my bathing suit down. All the way, around my ankles. I don't think the instructor realized because he was was just holding me in the air for about 5-10 seconds.

So there I was, hanging me air, full frontal to EVERYONE in the pool. Everybody died laughing. I was screaming and wriggling so hard to fall back into the pool but I wasn't strong and couldn't break the instructor's grip. I think there may be a plaque up somewhere about the incident.

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When I was about 8 years old we took a field trip to the Field Museum here in Chicago. We had a lunch break and I wandered off to the gift shop to see what they had. I had a huge crush on this girl named Victoria in my class and I saw this lady bug ring for a couple of dollars. I knew she liked lady bugs and I had money my parents gave me to buy something at the shop, so I decided to buy the ring and give it to her.

I was really nervous and kept waiting for the right time to do it. I eventually decided to just go for it and walked up to her near the end of the trip. She was with some of her friends which made me more nervous, but I found the courage to do it. She looked at the ring and laughed. Her friends joined her and she then tossed the ring in the trash.

I was completely devastated and tried hard to hold back my tears. Even though I'm over it now, that completely screwed my confidence with girls for a long time. Looking back, I may have embarrassed her too giving it to her in front of her friends, which is why she reacted that way, but whatever the case, it's probably the most embarrassed I have been in my life.

7th grade. Wrote way too much self-insert fan fiction about my cute teachers. Examples:

Cute science teacher. A terrible story about my self-insert character being a shy student with a deep interest in science. The teacher invites her for a 1-on-1 soil sampling expedition in the mountains. Suddenly, a blizzard comes and we have to huddle together in the cave for warmth... and naturally, he begins to see her differently and falls in love with her. Lots of cringey "What makes you different makes you beautiful" kind of dialogue in this one...

Cute tennis coach. Wrote an underdog story about him singling out my self-insert character as a clumsy yet hardworking diamond in the rough, training her extra hard in 1-on-1 sessions. Soon, she gets so good that she's about to achieve her dream of becoming a state tennis champion! But when my character gets a debilitating arm injury from a driving accident where the driver who hit her dies, coach helps her find her physical and mental strength again. Also, he falls in love with her. (I should add the character wasn't driving... she was too young. She was a pedestrian and yet somehow the driver dies.)

Cute drama teacher. The self-insert character has an amazing gift for acting despite her sloppy and unassuming appearance. The drama teacher goes full Henry Higgins on the protagonist's Eliza Doolittle, turning her into a polished and confident young woman... and yes, the play they're putting on is My Fair Lady, too (which isn't at all too on-the-nose).

After the student who's playing Henry Higgins AND his understudy (the protagonist's best friend) get food poisoning from eating the same pizza, the drama teacher is forced to take over his spot on opening night. (I had just learned about food's Danger Zone in class and wanted to share my knowledge that you should never eat a pizza that was left on the counter overnight.) After acting together with the self-insert character on that fateful day, he begins to see her through new eyes and falls in love with her.

Cute history teacher. I guess history teachers are too boring to be written about, so he got inserted into a totally different role. My self-insert character was a pioneer woman/homesteader who crosses paths with him on the fateful Children's Blizzard of 1888. She's a widow who never had a chance to fulfill her dream of having children before her husband died of cholera on their long journey to settle in Nebraska. (I played a lot of Oregon Trail). He never had a chance to find a wife because he was an escaped indentured servant.

Together, they have to rescue the children before they all freeze to death. After some of the kids' parents die in the blizzard, the self-insert and teacher-insert characters adopt the orphans, get married in a tree cathedral (a la the Santa Claus is Comin' to Town Rankin-Bass special) and presumably live happily ever after.

It wouldn't have been so bad if it was kept private, but my older sister found the notebook and would cry with laughter about it along with her cool friends.

Me and my friend were playing with some robot dog toy or something, but it died. Went into my parents room knowing the dresser beside their bed had a package of batteries.

We rummaged through the drawer and accidentally stumbled across my parents... adults toys and some dirty magazines. Our immediate idea is to prank my older sister and plant them in her room. Ultimately we decide that would be too mean, since she wasn’t a part of the discovery and it wouldn’t be funny to her. We grab the batteries and return to our dog toy.

Anyways, long story short, my friend thought it would be funny to plant the toy and mags in my room. I shouldn’t have trusted her, but the second I went to the bathroom she snuck them under my bed.

I didn’t realize for the entire weekend. Monday morning at school, she comes up to me dying of laughter and asks what my parents said. I didn’t really get what she meant, then she spilled the beans: all this embarrassing stuff is under my bed frame. Cue to me running home after school praying to god my parents don’t realize what is missing from their bedside drawer.

My mom's acting funny when I get home. She asks how my day is, I say fine. She tells me she cleaned my room for me in this really weird tone.

My stomach drops and I’m like... great, my parents think I actively stole and used their toy. I drop my bag off in my room and look under my bed, and everything is gone. She definitely found it.

I was so shy and awkward I just avoided them for as long as possible. I should have just told them my best friend was pranking me but the idea of talking to my parents about it made me want to die. So I just didn’t. So my parents have continued on, to this day, thinking I took their toys and hid them under my bed.

A little more info for those asking: I’m a girl, my relationship with my parents was awkward for a bit but unaffected for the most part, my friend definitely was a savage. I intend to tell my parents about it but they’re really shy, quiet people and they’ll get all embarrassed -- also, I am still awkward as heck and don’t really want to talk about it. Maybe one day.