When I was 13 I went to see Herbie Goes Bananas with two friends.
Believing we were above such things (and if we were, then what the hell were we doing at the movie?) we decided that we would have a good old laugh at its expense. We made what we thought were cutting remarks about the movie, very loudly, and hooted with laughter at our own wit. All the way through. We also threw peanut M&Ms around.
When the lights came up we were no longer so big, nor so clever, especially when we saw all the disappointed-looking kids with their aggrieved-looking parents glaring at us. We slunk out and ran away.
Anyway, I don’t know who any of the people were that we upset, and I’m sure they don’t remember the incident, but I do - and I’m sorry.
When I was in 5th grade I got caught chewing gum. The teacher said I had to write a full-page essay about why I was chewing gum. So I wrote this long, incredibly detailed explanation of how I had a headache, but I couldn’t swallow pills, and I was forced to chew Aspergum (gum containing aspirin), even though I knew it was wrong and how I felt incredibly guilty about it but couldn’t suffer from my debilitating headaches while I was at school because my schoolwork would suffer. She came to me and apologized profusely and sympathized, and told me I could chew gum whenever I wanted.
Sorry, teacher- that was big, fat lie. I was chewing Hubba Bubba.
When I was a 14-year-old runaway, my pals and I were hanging around in downtown Minneapolis at a bus stop when the leader of our pack snuck up behind an elderly man and set his burning cigarette on the brim of the man’s fedora. In a moment, the bus pulled up, the man got on, and none of us brought his smoldering hat to his attention.
I was a rotten kid as far as the courts and my mother were concerned, but I wasn’t into causing harm to other people, so I was always mildly haunted by this episode. That gentleman is certainly dead by now, but to everybody who is annoyed or possibly even injured by the thoughtless prank of a teenager, my apologies.
I am also totally ashamed of all the garbage I threw out of car windows before I grew up enough to realize how incredibly stupid it was, but at least I can perform penance for that by picking up litter along the highway now. The old man’s hat is irredeemable.
I’m sorry for all of the times I was rude to my mom when I was a teen. After **my ** daughter started to give **me ** a hard time, I went to mom and dad’s and told her that I was sorry for being such a brat. She just laughed and said that it was OK, and that she could snicker at me now that I’m dealing with it myself.
She and my dad have had a lot of giggles over the things that my kid has done to turn my hair grey. The youngest is 13 - who knows what he’ll come up with?
What comes around goes around where bratty teens are concerned!
When I was in 5th grade I got angry at a girl I went to school with and wrote her a scathing note declaring her a sworn enemy. I really don’t know why I was taking out my anger on this girl but I actually called her a whore in the letter. It never occurred to me that it was an inappropriate or hurtful thing to do. She gave the letter to my teacher, who was horrified on her behalf and really alarmed by the rage inherent in what I wrote. I didn’t even understand that until much later. I’m sorry.
My high school marching band had a sort of boot camp at the end of summer, a couple of weeks before school started, to ensure that we had our halftime show well-learned before footbal season. The last night of band camp featured “kangaroo court,” an unsupervised event at which seniors would instruct freshmen to do a variety of physically harmless but usually embarassing things for the entertainment of the other band camp attendees.
When I was a senior, I picked out a shy, unattractive, geeky kid and demanded that he sight-read a difficult piece of music in front of us, to the delight of the assembled crowd. This is probably not the worst thing that ever happened to him, but he was nevertheless mortified. Having been a shy, unattractive, geeky kid myself, I should have known better. I had spent the previous 11 years being bullied. It was wrong and inexcusably cruel of me to have exploited someone else’s discomfort for my amusement. I am sorry both for what I did and for not having the decency to apologize to him directly.
When i was younger i paid for a single ticket at a movie theatre, but saw 2 movies.
The funniest part of this was that in order to find the right cinema for the second film we had to go into literally EVERY OTHER cinema, sometimes even asking patrons what movie was showing.
When I was a kid, I was whiny, sulky, and a poor sport. Now that I am a teacher I feel like writing apology notes to all of my own teachers. (I actually did write an apology note to my mom, thanking her for not killing me when I was a teenager.)
On my way out of the house to go to school, my dad asked me for a hug. I refused, thinking it was funny. He looked a little hurt. The more hurt he got, the funnier I thought it was. When I left the house, I looked up at his bedroom window, and he was looking at me with a really sad and forlorn look on his face. I felt terribly guilty, and haven’t really gotten over it.
I’m sorry, dad. I know I’ve hurt you even worse in the years that followed. But I love you, and always have. Our last phone conversation was awesome.
I am sorry for dragging you to White Nights. But, in fairness, it was in retribution for that obscure Apocalyptic movie* that you dragged me too that was playing at the Artsy Fartsy Theater. ( which I enjoyed and you hated and still bring it up to this day.) YOu haven’t forgotten and bring it up still 25 years later.
I’m sorry you haven’t grasped the concept of Letting Go. It is just not that funny.
*I have no idea what the movie was, but it was in the mid-80’s and there were like 3 survivors of the BOMB dropping and the reason they survived was because they were all individually on the brink of death. I think it was a NZ film. Maybe Aussie.
When I was 13, I silently farted in 8th grade Spanish class (a real green-cloud, peel the paint from the walls, curl-your-nose-hair SBD), then blamed it on my best friend, who was made by the teacher to apologize for the class for stinking up the joint, even through his vehement protestations that it wasn’t him.