Foot In Your Mouth Mondays, Volume I

Inspired by dear Johanna, I have decided to start a special feature here at casa de pseudo (which hopefully will help give me enough new material to keep me writing every day in November): I’m calling it “Foot in Your Mouth Mondays.”

That’s right. Every Monday this month I will regale you with a fabulous tale of a time when I just stepped right into it and stuck my foot so far into my mouth that there was no way to make it better. (I do this kind of a lot. I have a filter problem.)

But Foot In Your Mouth Mondays is not just for laughing AT me, dear readers. Foot In Your Mouth Mondays is your opportunity to cringe WITH me, to share, via comments or on your own blog, things that you have done- gaffes from the past, if you will- that still cause you to cringe months or even years later. That’s right, let’s all scrape through our collective memories and purge ourselves of our most embarrassing missteps. It’ll be liberating!

To get things rolling, I will give you my personal favorite from distant history:

The scene: 5th grade. I am with my lab partner Erik, on whom I have a TREMENDOUS crush, and we are observing our chameleon for science class. We are debating what to name said chameleon. I would really like to name it “Erik I Love You Let’s Go Get French Fries Together After School,” but that seems too forward, so I say “I’ll name it anything you want to name it.”

“I dunno,” he says. “It’s a chameleon. Who cares?”

“Well,” I say, “we wouldn’t want to give it some awful, horrible name that would make all the other chameleons make fun of it and turn it into a chameleon outcast. We wouldn’t want to name it like Gertrude or something- that would be awful. I mean can you imagine how awful it would be to be named Gertrude?”

“What’s wrong with Gertrude? My mother is named Gertrude!” he said, angrily, and with a little quiver in his voice.

“Oh! Um! Nothing wrong with Gertrude, really! I mean, does she go by ‘Trudy’? Trudy is a pretty cool name! Let’s name her Gertrude!”

Needless to say, Erik and I never went on that after-school french fry date.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how we remember some things so vividly, even if they happened almost 20 years ago, when I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast most mornings? I remember the fucking chameleon incident SO WELL, even though I don't think I even remember Erik's last name. I'm still embarrassed about it, and if I ran into Erik at an elementary school reunion (side note: THANK GOD such things do not exist) I probably would feel compelled to offer some sort of apology for that time I made fun of his mom's name because I AM RIDICULOUS. For me, my most vivid memories are of the times when I did really embarrassing things, which makes my life look in retrospect like one big protracted page of Say Anything. Gah.

What about you? Any foibles from your distant past that can still make you blush with embarrassment at having said them? It's okay, if you're too embarrassed to share, I'll be back next week with another edition of Foot in Your Mouth Mondays.