recent polaroids

Polaroid got fucked up, turned into a picture of burnt cheese
With a baby Diet Coke and fake tattoo on 4/20
Using face masks in Asheville before seeing Beach
House
Ben took this really awful Polaroid of me, but instead of getting rid of it forever I turned it into a BLINGEEEEEE
Dash took this Polaroid in my car at night without the flash . . . THANKS DASH

Have you guys ever had Wild Irish Rose? It's $2 and tastes like whiskey mixed with cheap wine. DELICIOUSThis is how 22-23 year olds play dress up

Revisiting Movies I Shouldn't Have Seen

When I was in fourth grade one of my teachers asked my class, "What is the one thing you wish you could do but can't because you're not old enough?" Looking back, I'm surprised no one said anything jackassy; everyone had pretty legit answers: stay up late, drive a car, get married. I triumphantly answered, "See R-rated movies," to an explosion of laughter. A few kids thought that was just a stupid answer while others bragged that their parents already let them watch R-rated movies (doubtful, in retrospect). But it honestly was my answer.
I was never rebellious in the way that if my mom said "Don't touch that," I felt compelled to touch it. I listened. Where I was rebellious was if my mom said "Don't watch that," or "Don't listen to that." If I was told not to watch a movie/TV show or listen to something, I immediately needed to know why. And since my mom couldn't ever be that specific (for instance, she couldn't say that she was more concerned about Minnie Driver miming a blowjob with a beer than the language in Good Will Hunting), it just made me want to know more.
This is where my different methods of viewing specific material came in. If I wasn't allowed to listen to something, that was a lot easier to do in secret, via the radio or my older sister's music collection or other means. Watching forbidden things were more of a challenge. The easiest method was, if my sister was in on it, to watch things when my parents weren't home. This worked particularly well for Kids in the Hall. Another method was sitting really close to the TV so I could have the volume on as low as possible, with either Nickelodeon or The Disney Channel programed on the TV remote's channel return button in case of close-by parents. Those two tactics didn't work very well for movies, however. My go-to method for seeing forbidden movies was wait until someone in my family rented it. After I was expelled from the living room so they could watch it, I snuck back in using a series of crawls and hiding places until I reached my spot behind the couch. Our couch also had recliners, so there some big spaces left open, big enough for my child self to get a clear view of the TV.
It would make sense if I continually did this only to find that the show or movie in question was in fact tame enough for me to handle. But that was almost never the case. Except for Kids in the Hall, pretty much everything I watched that I wasn't supposed to traumatized me in some way. Such as:
Jerry Maguire - There's a sex scene in Jerry Maguire that's really not long at all but completely fucked up my vision of what sex was. I always imagined sex had something to do with a bed, lots of sheets, and a guy on top of a girl, kissing her. I wasn't sure on the details. But in Jerry Maguire, the sex scene in question takes place not on a bed, but (I'm going on memory here) against a bookcase. And there's sitting involved, not laying. And the lights are on, and the girl sits on the boy's lap. I didn't know what this was and for many years changed my views on lap sitting.
Jaws - I didn't sneak watching Jaws. I watched it with my family when I was relatively young, if I remember correctly it had a lot to do with whining and bitching about how I was never allowed to watch anything. For 95% of the movie I was fine . . . a little freaked out, but Jaws really doesn't show much for most of the movie. But in that final shark showdown, when Robert Shaw is getting chomped from the bottom up while spewing blood from his mouth, I sat up from the couch, turned around to face my parents, and burst into tears. I couldn't handle it anymore. For the next few days my mom and sister had to continually convince me that no one actually died on the set of Jaws and that there are crazy magic capsules that actors can chew to make fake blood come out (I didn't believe them). I didn't see Jaws again until college.
Murder of Innocence - I went into more detail about this in a previous post. I don't really remember the actual viewing of this, only my nightmares about it afterward. But I would bet money I hid behind the couch while my mom watched it, because I was stupid.
Scream - I saw Scream for the first time last night since I was about 10. I originally saw Scream as a child with my friend, who brought it over after her older sister rented it, when I was home alone. I wanted to see it so bad to see what all the fuss was about. Needless to say, by the time Drew Barrymore is hanging from a tree with her intestines hanging out (no more than 10 minutes into the movie) I was sobbing. And for SOME REASON I still watched the rest. This led to my inability to answer the phone when home alone (which may or may not have manifested into my current inability to answer my phone when I don't know the number). It also made me think that boys might actually all be evil killers who don't just want to pressure you into having sex with them, but want to pressure you into having sex with them so they can murder you afterward.
A Clockwork Orange - I don't remember how I saw this one, either. But I was in either sixth or seventh grade and watched it alone, without sneaking it. I'm pretty sure it was a Jaws-like situation: after much begging and whining about how I'm way too mature to be denied any movie, I think my mom just might have just let me watch it. I don't think I talked about it for a long time afterward because I didn't want to admit that it was possibly the scariest thing I had ever seen and couldn't stop obsessing over it. Upon multiple viewings + aging past 12, I now see it as much more funny than it is scary, but at the time if someone told me it was supposed to be funny I would probably assume they were a crazed rapist. It also permanently changed the way I felt about the song "Singin' the Rain," which my dad would sing to me when I was really little while he washed my hair.
The Silence of the Lambs - Back when my family were patrons of Video Plus, a local video store before Blockbuster came to town, the shelves were arranged in such a way that to get to the new releases, you had to walk through horror. On the end of one of the rows was The Silence of the Lambs. I'll never forget the first time I saw the VHS cover. It was by far the most terrifying image I had ever seen. After that, I always walked in a long circle to bypass the horror shelves to get to the new releases. If I caught a glimpse of the cover, my day was fucked. When I was in middle school, I finally felt ready to watch the movie. Surprisingly, what fucked me up more than anything was when Buffalo Bill opens his robe to reveal his tucked penis. I did not know a penis could do anything but just be there, so at the time I thought this was revealing that he was actually a woman. When I asked my mom about it, she gingerly explained about penis tucking, the thought of which made me think of male genitalia as absolutely freakish and terrifying. I maintained this feeling until I saw a real one for the first time in high school, which pretty much caused me to a complete 180 on my personal views on penises.
Those are just a few. Interestingly enough, some of the most traumatizing movies I saw weren't forbidden at all, such as Sleeping Beauty and Ernest Scared Stupid. And when I eventually saw Good Will Hunting when I was about 13, the language didn't faze me and I didn't understand what Minnie Driver was doing, so I just sort of forgot about it.
This curiosity bled into books, which I was never forbidden to read. That's why I first read Lolita when I was 14 and am eternally grateful for it. So I'm glad I was fueled by my intense curiosity now, though at the time it was a major source of sleeplessness and stomach aches.