My mom dislikes alcohol because she's never seen it be anything but the worst.  That makes sense, when you think about it, because alcohol is really only good for one thing and bad news for everything else.  It's a lot like Shaquille O'Neal.  Basically, I grew up with a mom who had never seen alcohol play basketball, she had only ever seen it star in Kazaam.  So she was very adamant that I never start acting.  I mean drinking.

Then I went to college.  And I slowly learned how to drink.  I felt pretty guilty about it and, though I had fun when I drank, preferred not to acknowledge I had done it after the fact.  Much like Fight Club.  If it did come up, immediate denial and self-loathing would take hold.

My 21st birthday was a terrifying event.  It was 6 years ago so the song didn't exist yet, but if it had, I'm sure my friends would have described the night as, “shots, shots, shots, shotsshots, shots, shots, shots, shotsshots EVERYBODY.”  2010 will go down in the music history books right up there with 1967, I'm sure.  Anyways, as the night wore on and the shots added up, I grew paranoid; convinced my friends were going to betray me... going to leave me in a ditch to choke on my own vomit or, worse yet, let me grow up to lead the rest of my life as a worthless drunk who brought shame to the family.  It was exhilarating.  I wasn't sure if I was being poisoned to death or having the best night of my life.  I was scared, angry and overjoyed.

And I think the pictures from that night reflect all of those things... oh pictures!  So accurate and non-refutable...

6 years later, my mom, a teacher, encouraged a young student interested in my career to Google me.  My mom later Googled me herself out of curiosity and was very surprised at what came up under the image search. The email from my mom the day of the event was solemn and ominous.

Mary, I did an image search with your name and was surprised by the pictures 

that come up of you. You might want to check them out. Mom

So I Googled myself and there I was looking back at myself through bleary, drunken, 21-year-old eyes.  I had Googled myself in the past and these had never shown up before!  Yet unbeknownst to me, I spent a Monday afternoon sloppy drunk in front of my mom and an impressionable youth.  Why now?  It was worse than the time I ran over a mailbox with my mom in the passenger seat and then turned to her and said, “okay, you're right... I'm too close to the white lines.”  To think, I was the one who taught her how to Google as a fun way to pass the time over the holidays!  A fun way to spy on my sisters and gossip about their new boyfriends! Now, I was the one with something to gossip about.  The ol' switcheroo.  

Maybe the most regrettable thing about those pictures is that at the time they were taken, though I grew up in and lived in Cleveland – and had NEVER been to New York City – I chose to wear a shirt that said “Brooklyn” across the front of it.  Now, years later, I live in Brooklyn.  The hope that anybody stumbling across these pictures (possible employers!) might write them off as outdated and therefore forgivable is now even less likely to happen.  I might as well have held up a sign reading, “can you believe how mean Ricky Gervais was to all those poor actors at the 2011 Golden Globes?  LOL!”  If I could turn back time, I would change into a shirt reading, “it's my 21st birthday so this is not out of the ordinary and I will be a productive, sober member of society after this. I'm also easy to work with and my biggest weakness is working too hard.”

Though the pictures from my 21st birthday have been removed from the host site, they still show up when my name is searched as small cautionary thumbnails linking to nothing but my shame.  My only hope is that one day a Google search of one of my friends will reveal equally scandalous photos, thus making me feel better about myself and allowing me to judge them.  After all, isn't that why we, with the exception of mothers, online stalk each other in the first place?