1. When I heard that S.E. Hinton wrote and published The Outsiders at the age of 16, I made a vow to myself that I'd do the same. I did not. In retrospect, this was certainly helpful in that I was able to commit to something, but also, The Outsiders is definitely written by a sixteen-year old, and perhaps the only thing more insufferable might have been The Catcher In The Rye, not counting the book I thought I was going to write. Oh well.
2. At the time, I thought that sneaking around in the dark was a total blast, no harm no foul. Like the Native Americans counting coup on their enemies. Now I'm pretty sure I was just an adrenaline-starved teenager.
2.1 On the other hand, the games of cross-town flashlight tag that myself and the other teenage hooligans organized were some of the formative experiences of my youth. Additionally I am still very glad that I was not shot by the police when I was almost arrested while running around in a trailer park where a car thief was rumored to be operating.
3. I wore a choker on Picture Day, senior year of high school, just to mess with my parents. Then I forgot about it, and then didn't bother getting professional senior photos done. Guess which picture they used in the yearbook.
4. Speaking of the yearbook, I confess that I still have not forgiven the advisor who was in charge of us, the year I was on the yearbook production team. She gave me no useful help whatsoever, did not tell me about any of the oversights or mistakes I'd made in my work, threw out all my work without telling me, and made everyone else promise not to tell me either. I had to find out from my friends on the yearbook team, after the fact. What a bitch.
5. I definitely fooled around with more girls on my buddy's parents' couch than I ever admitted to him. However, I did make sure nothing got stained. I'm not an asshole.
6. I practiced running away from home by crashing on a different buddy's couch for a week, just to see if my parents would try to find me. They did try, I found out later, but they didn't try any harder than calling my girlfriend, who said she didn't have any idea where I was. She really didn't know, she wasn't covering for me and would have told them if she'd known, but then I somehow never thought to ask, how come they didn't call anyone else?
7. I earned the ire of the art students when we held an art sale and I was the only one who set reasonable prices on my work. You dumbshits, we're in high school, they're not going to pay you $200 for your perspective practice, and I have Mountain Dew to buy. Sorry not sorry.
8. I stole a coat from a pioneer reenactment exhibit. We were out there, my shiftless hooligan associates and I, because it was a good place to smoke out in the dark (we thought). When the cops showed up, they wrote us some tickets, and of course they noticed my associate wearing the lady pioneer dress from the exhibit. Yet they never noticed I was wearing the gentleman pioneer's coat. When they finally drove away and left us sitting on the curb, I looked down and realized I was still wearing it. I still have it, of course.