How Embarrassing...?

One of the first writing assignments I was ever given in High School was to write about my most embarrassing moment.  I just wrote down something along the likes of, “Having to write this stupid infantile meaningless (etc.)... essay.”  It was a litany of double-spaced synonyms stretching down the page, and after handing it in, I was told to redo it properly.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to write up something personally embarrassing to me.  It was that I couldn’t remember one.  To me, being unable to think up anything was embarrassing in itself.

I couldn’t remember anything that could be considered embarrassing, so I made something up that could be considered embarrassing to other people. That essay was accepted and praised for being more honest.  But I can’t recall a word I wrote.

I’ve never been accustomed to feeling embarrassed.  Being self-conscious about being seen doing something in public, sure.  Being uncomfortable about reading / watching something that makes me emotionally insecure, sure.  But, not typical things that would normally embarrass other people.  I didn’t mind when my Mom showed up at school to give presentations and help out.  She was looking out and supporting me.

As a kid, I would be late for when the school bus came to pick me up, being more preoccupied with the TV.  At first, Mom had me go to school in my pyjamas, *certain* that the shame would shake me out of my complacency.  It didn’t.

I only changed my habits when I went to school without having lunch prepared, and then wasn’t allowed to have any food.  The teachers had been warned beforehand, and were told not to share their lunches with me, no matter how much I complained, even as they agonized over my reactions, but my Mom said it was necessary.  When I came home that day, I was practically starving, and my Mom said something along the likes of, “If you had been prepared before the bus came, you would’ve had lunch.”

Since then, I’ve always made it a point to be on time for anything.

It might’ve seemed borderline abusive at the time, but she was just applying Logical Consequences, which are different from Natural Consequences, where a child learns things after making silly mistakes and figuring things out, which is pretty much the mainstay of children’s TV episodes.  Once the child realizes that certain actions result in certain consequences, they’ll be better prepared to avoid doing that again.  But other times, there are moments when simply learning the lesson afterwards doesn’t work, or won’t stick without outside intervention. 

My main problem was that I never learned these potentially reputation-saving lessons until long after the fact.

When most other students would have been embarrassed at the concept of sex ed, I just engaged the lessons with the same clinical detachment as any other class, having been familiar with the source material, thanks to books like Where Did I Come From? and What’s Happening to Me?, which explained body functions like the most normal thing in the world with silly drawings.

That in turn led to me being called the 12-letter ‘M’ word.  (No, the other one)

One time in class, the teacher gave a question.  I don’t remember the question, let alone what subject we were talking about.  It could’ve been ‘things that were once thought to be harmful’, but I remember the answer I piped up with, which was, “Like Masturbating?” which elicited tons of laughs from all the students around me.  I had no idea what was so funny, and it had to be explained that even though the text said the act wasn’t something to be ashamed of, what I said wasn’t the kind of thing normally said in public conversation.  For about a year, I was paired up with a lab partner who disparagingly nickednamed me ‘Masturbation’.

Even though the act was on my mind, having it continuously pointed out and reminded really rankled on me.  I couldn’t understand why these High School teens were so utterly infantile about basic sexuality.  (Looking back on my thoughts and actions now, that should’ve been a big honking clue)

To this day, I have reoccurring dreams of being naked at school, but in these scenarios, I’m more concerned about completing my 3-month project due in 2 weeks that I haven’t even started and didn’t even know about.

I also never understood what was supposed to be so funny about men wearing women’s clothes.

If it was okay for women to wear men’s clothes, then shouldn’t the reverse be true?  Just wear whatever’s comfortable!  If the clothes you want to wear are on the other side of the rack, that shouldn’t be a deterrent, just as long as it fits.  

I don’t really care about fashion or style, just function.  My choices are fairly basic.  I prefer to wear soft clothes with seamless seams, little social commentary (allegiance to specific sports teams or cartoons are visually distracting) I’ve often had to have the holes in my clothes pointed out, since I’m so used to feeling comfortable, and don’t really care about how I’m perceived.

When I started getting more invested in comics that weren’t of the Newspaper variety, I was quite enthusiastic about reading digest collections of Richie Rich and Archie.  (Don’t sneer - they were extremely popular and cheap) But the more I read them, the more I noticed that there was an element in these comics that kept cropping up that annoyed me.  It wasn’t the repetitive plots, the page limitations or the corny jokes.  It was that the sentences invariably ended with exclamation points, and there were very few instances where periods were put in place, and that put me off.  (Question marks didn’t count)

When I become overexposed to media, I become hyper-aware of the limitations of the form, and once notice something that keeps showing up, it becomes impossible to ignore, especially when certain themes start to show up.

I don’t know when it started (probably around Twilight & the Hunger Games), but I got annoyed when dystopian stories struggling under suppression started shoehorning in romance plots which only served to distract, particularly love triangles that hardly elevated the story, and would’ve benefited from their absence.  Why did EVERY story need a forced romance subplot?  Being more interested in creating artificial drama than authentic chemistry.

I got so annoyed by this that I even parodied this outlook early on in my WebNovel:

“There are Romance serials where there’s built-up sexual tension between a guy and a girl who have loads of chemistry.  This can last for hundreds of pages.  The buildup can be so prolonged that audiences can go into a wild frenzy if the two wind up not getting together.  Modern Romances have decided to sidestep this annoying will they/won’t they dilemma by having them kiss early on.”

The Girl made an overhead sweep with her arm.  “Get it out of the way!  Once that’s over and done with, the audience that’s been tingling with anticipation can finally concentrate and enjoy the rest of the story without wondering whether these two will hook up or not.  It doesn’t matter if they never kiss again, since they’ve already done the dirty deed.  You understand?”

Harlequin Romance novels basically get a bad rap for catering to women, basically serving up the same plot, but the same argument doesn’t seem to apply to Hollywood, where EVERY movie was really a Romance movie and were little more than flimsy excuses for executives and directors to openly harass their actresses without fear of retribution, since they’d never work in film ever again if they didn’t ‘play nice’.

Elia Kazan explained that studio heads “thought of every film they made, no matter how serious a theme, as a love story.” As a result, he admits cleverly but crudely, “They went by a simple rule and a useful one: Do I want to f*** her?” Kazan justified that disgusting calculus, explaining: “The audience must be interested in the film’s people in this elemental way…. If the producer wasn’t interested in an actress this way, he was convinced an audience wouldn’t be.”

More and more, I found myself looking forward to watching movies for the rare instances where the two leads of opposite sex didn’t wind up romantically entangled.  These unicorn moments always came as a pleasant surprise.

Circling back to my topic earlier, I likewise didn’t see the big deal in seeing affectionate action between my parents.  It was casual and often spontaneous.  But having to see kissing scenes where none was needed started to annoy me, like it was checking off some bulletpoints on a script.

“Okay, we’ve got the rising action, the inspirational speech, the teaser for the sequel, the MacGuffin and the saved cat.  What’s left?”

“The cast.”

In the Hays code, any hint of salacious behaviour onscreen that could’ve been possibly hinted at was looked down on, until it was overturned, and then any restrictions on once-taboo subjects was let loose.  (Particularly with Some Like it Hot)  In that sense of freedom, something was lost.  Look at any new pilot of any show, and see how often someone’s making out or getting out of bed with a lover.  It’s a fast way to attract attention, but is extremely repetitive and becomes noticeable when overused.

I'm reminded of Cinema Paradiso, where censors would routinely edit out any kissing scenes.  That was until the house theater burned down, and was replaced with a commercial theater, where the once-deleted scenes were left intact to the delight of the viewers who were constantly denied the pleasure of forbidden voyeurism.  The significance of a kiss should be in the rarity it provides.  If we’re seeing kisses everywhere, then that significant action becomes lessened when it should be meaningful.

The manga Ah... And Mm... Are All She Says, about a socially awkward teenage Hentai artist delved in interesting behind-the-scenes details behind the production of an otherwise shameless industry.  And then after 4 volumes with no hint of romance, it ended with a kiss between the two leads.  At first, it annoyed me, seeing it resort to such cliched outcomes, but then I thought about it, and was fine with the outcome.  Sometimes there are some things that simply can’t be conveyed with words.

With this, I can rest easy, having produced a more suitable essay on the subject of embarrassment than would've been accepted back then.  Though I doubt it'd be easily accepted with the visual aids and sudden change in subject material halfway through.  But at least I'll remember this one.