Who can ponder adolescence without grimacing over the awkwardness, the mislaid obsessions, the fevered angst? Mortified (here) and Cringe (here) are two separate projects in which the participants share the physical mementos of their teenaged years – diaries, letters, poems, photos, or whatever. Call it giggly 80’s nostalgia, call it therapeutic self-humiliation, but I call it a bunch of 30-somethings obsessively rehashing their past to compensate for coming of age before LiveJournal and MySpace.
I’ve toyed with the idea of attending one of these readings in Boston to share some of my “artifacts.” I can’t even look at my old journals and notes without subduing a spasm to scratch out my eyes in embarrassment. And that’s precisely the stuff that people go nuts over.
According to the Mortified website, the best material should be “unaware why it’s funny and autobiographically revealing.” The more embarrassing, the more cathartic, so I bring you a poem that I wrote in my diary when I was 14 years old, called “My Fragile Vase.” (P.S. This poem has nothing to do with losing my virginity.)
