My face is pressed to prickly grass, the sun is an orange glow through my closed eyes. Around me a soft rippling of conversations, children shouting a long way off. Relaxed.

Out of nowhere a vivid memory. I'm kissing a girl clumsily. Later we're in the kitchen drinking coffee and she says Were you trying to french kiss me? The awful, unbearable embarrassment seeps out of the memory like lava. I burn. As memory "me" mumbles No I involuntarily shout No! You idiot!.

My eyes are open, the gentle surrounding conversations have stopped and everyone is looking at me. An embarrassing memory.

One time at a dance, after some three day event. A Pink Floyd song was played. I saw a girl I had met at the event was enjoying the song and I tried to make some kind of cool hippie waving hands in your face gesture. She misinterperted it and waved me off saying "no, no, it's not a slow dance song". So after the song, it became very important to me to seek out this girl and tell her that I did not, in fact, want to actually dance with her or anything.

If you're out there, I'm sorry, and I'm a jerk.

While this memory is certainly embarrassing, it still manages to crack me up. I was an innocent child, after all. It also goes to show one of the many downsides to having television be your only nanny while growing up.

By the age of 10, I think I may have seen "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" about fifty times, along with a bounty of other 80's flicks. If you recall the film, there is a scene where Charlie Sheen and Jennifer Grey are sitting on a couch at a police station. When Sheen's character tells "Jeannie" (Grey) that there is someone she can go to about her problems, Jeannie replies with "If you say Ferris Bueller, you lose a testicle."

OK, well now I had yet to learn what a testicle was- all I really understood was that this was some kind of amusing threat. So, one day, while visiting at my sweet Southern Baptist grandparents' home, I ask my grandfather to retrieve my favorite doll house from the attic. As he slowly pulled himself up into the hallway attic, I yelled down the hall jokingly: "Hurry up Granddaddy! Or you lose a testicle!"

My grandmother, who stood behind me, gasped in shock. She forgave me after realizing that I did not understand the exact weight of the words. After she explained the cruelty of the threat, I was mortified and quite apologetic. I certainly did not want my grandfather to lose a testicle.

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