Thanks a lot, Seventeen.

After a solid week of watching the first season of Gilmore Girls, I decided to hit up TWoP for some recaps. I’m working my way through Kiss and Tell, the one where Dean kisses Rory for the first time in the market and she steals the cornstarch. Even though I was never a big Dean fan, the episodes depicting the beginnings of their relationship are so sweet and so very true to her age, at least the way I knew it. Rory’s first kiss was way better than mine. I’m not sure why I feel the need to share this, but I’m going to. Don’t laugh. It was the summer of 1994, right before my freshman year of high school. Some friends and I had gone to Six Flags for the day. There were four or five us, and we were traveling in a big attention-seeking pack, giggling and dancing and being typically chaotic. As groups of girls such as ours are wont to do, we found a similarly aged, similarly numbered group of teenage boys to hang out with. Boys like that are always exciting – they go to a different school, in a different city, in a different world. You can tell them you’re a cheerleader, or a writer, or in the circus and they’ll be none the wiser. One of these boys, Sean, was particularly interesting to me. I remember him being cute. I don’t remember much else, except that he was wearing a Soundgarden t-shirt, which I’m sure my 15-year-old self thought was soooooooooooo cool. We talked about music, we made fun of our friends, we rode the Flashback three times in a row. It was love. At the end of the night, as we were all making our way to courtyard at the front of the park where our parents would be picking us up, Sean grabbed my hand and pulled me into one of those photo booth machines. We took four goofy pictures and sat on a bench waiting for them to develop. He put his arm around me. He leaned in. He went for it. First kiss city. Not great, not bad. BUT. When it was over, I said, “That was my very first kiss.” Why? Because Seventeen or YM or Sassy had told me that if I said that, it would either explain why I was bad at kissing or impress because for a first-timer I was so skilled. Mortifying. We exchanged phone numbers, but we never talked again. I still have my half of the photo booth pictures in a box somewhere, along with my prom tickets and a rock I kicked down the street on a walk with my first real boyfriend. It’s not a terrible first kiss story, but it could be better. I do wish I hadn’t wasted it on someone I would never see again. But I’m thankful that the person on the receiving end of my teen-mag-influenced conversation is not around to tease me about it, because he would be fully justified. So, to steal from Pamie: I have decided that my first kiss was with CuteDean in aisle three by the bug spray, playing a "guess the soda" game, because that's how it should have been.