A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words

I mentioned repeatedly in my last post that I am "old". I believe the term I used was "old as fuck". Well, let me tell you there is one person on earth who can make you feel young and not in that young at heart, Celebrex commercial frenzy of activity type young, but YOUNG like " I am a teenager still living at home and I think I'm in troubs!".

That person is your mother.

My parents are finally getting around to doing something with my old room. Since the building my dad rents his art studio in is closing, they are turning the study into his studio and my room into the study. So this means I finally have to remove all the crap I have been storing there. Mostly books, stuffed animals, artwork and photos.

Ah yes, the photos.

When I visited my parents on Friday, my mom told me she had found a bunch of photos of mine stashed in books, drawers, various other places and had put them on my bookcase in a pile along with all my books, photo albums and other assorted "stuff" one accumulates when one lives at home more or less for 23 years. I went into my room to collect these photos.

I saw right away that the first one on the pile was me, with way too much makeup on (weird), sporting a tank top with the words "TEAM HPV" emblazoned on the front in glitter.

You know, from our "Come as Your Favorite STD" party.

Along with that was a picture of me was another few pictures of me and my friend Jill (wearing a matching Team HPV shirt), one of Jenny with her "Chlamydia is Not a Flower" stickers, and one that I can only assume is of a bunch of us trying to give my friend Jenn a lap dance.

Yeah, we were 21.

Also mixed in the pile my mother has oh so neatly put together were pictures of, well, let me tell you what the picture is of and then give you my story behind it so you can get the effect I can only assume my mother got.

Me, standing in the kitchen of my old apartment, posing with a tulip in my mouth and holding a used condom.

BUT what you can't tell from the picture is that earlier in the day my friend Kate and I had volunteered at a safe sex clinic, making condom care packages, and had been given a slew of them to hand out to friends. So we did the natural thing and used the condoms to make popsicles. You know, fill them up with juice, tie the end in a knot, freeze it. Then I had picked up a gross looking condom apres pop-making and been like "OMG TAKE A PIC".

Yeah, we were 18.


As soon as I looked through the first few pictures, I no longer felt old but rather like I was back in high school, thinking I am sneaky talking on the phone late at night in the basement not realizing my mother had come down to get a bottle of water. The reddened face. The catching of breath. Did she hear me just tell Jenn that "Only sluts give BJs"?

In any case my mom didn't mention the photos other than the where she had put them and even when I furtively tried to stash them all in a book only to have most of them fall to the floor, she acted no differently than if they had been pictures of our 1987 family trip to Disney World.

So apparently you are never too old to hope that your mom will always think of you as young and innocent. But luckily my mom is old enough that she knows to keep the pretense up.