My first kiss happened in a moon bounce on the roof of a fast food restaurant in Argentina.

She had kept telling me she wanted to kiss me but I was too busy bouncing around like the hyperactive pogo stick I was. I tried to elude her until she finally tackled me, pinning my puny 9-year-old body down until I relented.

After the infantile kiss rape was over, I got back up and kept bouncing around. After all, it was my birthday.

Her name was Lorena and she was my novia in Buenos Aires. We both attended Islas Malvinas, a primary school patriotically named after those barren islands the British stole from us.

It was a beautiful private school where the boys wore suits and tiny clip-on ties, and the girls wore checkered skirts and canary-yellow V-neck sweaters. Where most kids stayed after class to learn about Jesus and I had to go home to my “boring” Jewish customs.

It was where I played “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” with all the girls. Where we pledged our love to the sky-blue-and-white Argentina flag every morning and afternoon. Where I ate lunch my first week alone after I told a girl she was pretty and she told me I was “feo” and to go away.

It was also where I met Lorena. A year younger than me, we were in the same class and bonded over childhood trivialities I wish I could still remember.

She followed me around the playground even though I was smitten with the beautiful young teachers. When I realized Señorita Adriana would never be my girlfriend, I asked Lorena and she said yes.

She liked it when I spoke English to her and I never failed to impress her. Yes, I would tell her, I had lived in the U.S. and it was amazing.

But then I moved back to the states when I was 10, nearly a year after that first — and only — kiss . And I never saw or heard from her again.

Until now.

Nearly 24 years to the day that she nailed me to the floor of that moon bounce and made me a man, Lorena wrote me a simple message by way of (what else?) Facebook.

Como estas? No se bien si sos quien creo que eres. Solias vivir en Buenos Aires e ir a un colegio que se llamaba Islas Malvinas?
Beso,
Lorena”

Yes, Lorena, I was that same boy who went to your school. And though I had written before (HERE and HERE) about the strange power of Facebook, I never knew to what extent until now.

I wrote back. We talked about our lives and who we were, trying to bridge nearly a quarter of a century of our lives through this online medium. She stayed in Buenos Aires and became a jazz and Bossa Nova singer. She now lives near my grandma in the neighborhood of Belgrano.

We recalled moments from our childhood. She remembered things I had long ago forgotten. My freckles. My family. That I moved to Los Angeles.

I told her about our first kiss.

As it turns out, that she can’t remember.

Beso indeed.

I am a fucking magician.

Among other things, I can make water appear out of a faucet in the restroom in my office simply by placing may hands directly under the spout. Also, I can accurately predict a coin toss at a rate of 50%.

But I can’t do everything. For instance, I cannot make little girls happy simply by giving them a Happy Meal toy.

During lunch recently in the Ballston Mall, a father and his young daughter and son sat at the table next to me. Though I was engrossed in my book, I could not help but overhear the little girl whine and complain about how her McDonald’s Happy Meal did not come with a toy.

As my homosexual friend Foxymoron would say, “So traj.”

I finished my meal and decided to do what Haley Joel Osment died trying to pound into our skulls and pay it forward. I went to the McDonald’s counter and asked to speak to the manager. I explained that “my friend’s” daughter didn’t get a toy with her Happy Meal and that I was there to restore her faith in the human condition.

He grabbed a plastic-wrapped toy fire truck and handed it to me suspiciously.

I briefly considered taking it out and rolling it along the counter yelling “Vroom, vroom!”, just to see how he would react, but decided against it. There are enough comparisons to me acting like a child as it is.

I went back to the table and patted the dad on the shoulder.

“Excuse me, I couldn’t help overhear your daughter say she didn’t get a toy in her Happy Meal so I got her one,” I said.

You would have thought I had offered the dad a kidney. I swear I saw tears well up in his eyes. He grabbed my arm and shook my hand, effusively praising my kindness.

But his apple, unfortunately, did fall far from the tree.

He handed the toy to his daughter and said, “Thank the nice man, Tabitha.”

Tabitha grabbed the toy fire truck and looked at it. Then she threw it back at her dad.

“NO!”

Fucking Tabitha.

“Now, honey…” the dad started. But I didn’t stick around to hear him act like his 6-year-old daughter’s bitch. I walked away happy in the knowledge that Tabitha wasn’t my daughter.

And that I wouldn’t be buying Happy Meals anytime soon.

One of my favorite posts by Rothko at Nicolasix was one he wrote telling his mom about his blog. Hilarity ensued. Here is how it starts:

I recently gave my mom the address to this blog. She’s known I’ve had a blog - or as she calls it, a ‘blob’ - for some time, but she’s always figured it was something I might not want her to visit. Because, who knows, I might say something a little vulgar, perhaps. Or slip in some vaguely sexual pun. Or, you know, I might drop a few F-bombs down on this bee-atch.”

I never had the problem Rothko had since my mom knew I had a blob — er, blog — about 10 seconds after I started it. There have been moments when I have wished she, along with other family members and friends, didn’t know I had it since it would be easier to write about things I often feel I can’t share, like my inability to drink water out of a straw. So embarrassing.

I don’t mind that my mom reads my blog mainly because she gives me constant validation about my writing skills. My mom honestly doesn’t understand why I don’t have a book contract with a $100,000 first-time author advance or why my life hasn’t been optioned into a movie. All in due time, mom.

That’s the great thing about mothers: they think you’re a fucking genius even when you’re writing about how many five-year-olds you could beat up.

But what happens when someone else’s mom finds your blog?

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Baby Bien (who I’ve written about a lot here) sent me an e-mail alerting me to the fact that Mama Bien had stumbled across my blog. She spent nearly half an hour reading all about her son stupidly losing a $300 bet, wearing what she called “a fake Hitler mustache”, and giving me his mailing address “so now you get schmutz from the internet….oy,oy,oy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” (yes, she’s Jewish, too; all Jewish moms talk like this).

Mama Bien added:

It was fun reading your demented friend’s website. [Arjewtino] should be ashamed of himself… ha,ha…

Now that I’ve had a chuckle and a panic attack, you can safely resume your life. It is no longer a “visiting” site… No parental guidelines…

Love ya, Baby Bien…”

I was on the phone a while back shortly after I posted a photo on my blog of a vagina with a fish painted on it. She said she told a friend of hers at work about my blog and that she checked it out. On the very day that photo was posted. I warned her to look into sexual harassment laws in the L.A.U.S.D.

I suppose there is a lot about us that we don’t want our moms to find out. They often know us better than anyone yet there are facets of our lives we just wish they didn’t know. Moms fed your ungrateful ass, clothed you, comforted you, put Band-Aids on you when you fell off your bike trying to impress a girl, and we thank them by growing up and having the gall to lead our own lives.

Rinse and repeat.

PHOTO CREDIT

Back in March, I received a Facebook friend invitation from someone I used to know in high school (in the San Fernando Valley, CA). We weren’t exactly friends back then but were acquaintances and had some mutual friends, so I accepted.

Her friend request, though, didn’t come with any kind of message or “Hey, how’s it going!” or “Can’t believe how long it’s been!” comment.

So I took the novel approach of messaging her to see how she was doing. I wanted to keep it short since catching up with people on the last decade-and-a-half of your life is as much fun as watching cooking shows.

I noticed that her “network” was in Raleigh, so I wrote the following:

“So give me your 14-year recap. What are you up to? What took you to Raleigh?”

She responded with this:

“First of all, I was born in Raleigh…I came to LA when I was 13 years old, remember?

Everything is good…I am still in LA. Having fun…working, going out, dating, etc. How are you? DC, huh? How long have you been there?

Take care.”

There was so much wrong with this message I couldn’t even begin to deconstruct it in my head. “First of all”? Where was the “second of all”? We were barely friends in high school, how could I be expected to remember she was from North Carolina let alone her family’s continental migration habits?

I e-mailed Blue who, of course, also knew this girl. I copy-and-pasted our exchange. Not exactly the online social networking expert, Blue wrote back:

“This Facebook stuff is weird. How the f–k were you supposed to remember how old she was when she moved to LA or that she was born in Raleigh. You cant even remember that you didn’t get a hit in you first at bat at Dodger camp one month ago.”

Thanks, Blue.

Catching up with friends from high school is a superfluous act of nostalgic regression. You remember certain people for certain reasons (like who you took to prom) but have little to no interest in revisiting these memories (like your prom date getting picked up by her parents at 11pm). If these high school friends were so important to you, you would have stayed in contact with them in the first place.

But using Facebook, say, as opposed to the obnoxiously ubiquitous Classmates.com, is different. You can see how your high school “friends” have aged, what they’re doing, where they’re living, and who they’re hooking up with (if at all). You see people who once fretted about carrying enough AP classes instead holding babies. Or that popular asshole who you hated now “out and proud” and actually liking assholes.

And it makes it easier to skip high school reunions altogether, like an AP reporter wrote about yesterday.

The thing is, I didn’t even want to attend my 10-year high school reunion (back in 2003) even before the advent of Facebook. I just had no desire to see anyone face-to-face again and relive a time that had long passed me by. I’d rather look at them online, from afar, with the safety of an Internet connection acting as a social buffer.

In the past few weeks, I have “friended” a few other high school classmates and even joined my high school group.

Blue, however, isn’t sold:

“I don’t like this Facebook stuff. You two reconnect but have nothing to say to each other. Why even start it?”

I wrote the classmate who “friended” me two days later, asking her how she expected me to remember such information but asking who she’s still in contact with from high school.

That was two months ago. I haven’t heard back yet.

PHOTO CREDIT

In the past week, I have been told by two separate people, in two wholly different settings, that I look old.

The first came thanks to a picture GoPats took of me at a Nats game. The second, just a few days later, courtesy of my friend Beth at a happy hour, when she noticed how long my hair has gotten and how it, I suppose, has affected the way I look.

I have processed their comments, mulled their meanings over, and come up with this carefully constructed synopsis about my challenged youth: WHAT THE FUCK?

I have mentioned before how much I’m looking forward to old age and everything it promises, mainly a healthy amount of dementia and telling kids to get off my lawn. But I didn’t mean that I wanted to actually look old when it happened.

Luckily for me, my 12-year-old cousin is in town this week at some young whippersnappers’ leadership conference and he stayed with me for the weekend. I say “luckily” because what I have obviously needed lately is an injection of youth (emotional age not withstanding). My pallid countenance has been starved for an exuberance that can only be found by hanging out with a kid nearly a third of my age.

Before he arrived, I said to myself, Self, what should you do with this rapscallion? I mean, what does a 12-year-old boy actually like to do? What do they think about? Unfortunately, getting him drunk and taking him to his first strip club was probably not feasible. Possible, just not logistically plausible.

So instead, I decided to look back at what I liked to do when I was his age (20 fucking years ago) and what I would have wanted to do with my cool, older cousin. I found an old journal (not a diary, diaries are for chicks who believe in unicorns and dot their “i’s” with flowers) that I kept as a 12-year-old. After reading through it for clues, I realized something important. I was a weenie.

The journal centers mostly around my crush on a girl named Tina. I wrote some really anguishing sentences about her, like:

The only one who knows I like her is [Blue]. I love talking to her. Now when we talk, her voice doesn’t crack like it used to. OK, get this. Predita asked me to go to her birthday party this Saturday night. So I made up my mind. I was going to ask Tina to go. Not knowing she had already been invited, I asked Predita if I could invite her. She asks, ‘We have another Tina?’ I gave her a puzzled look. She continues, ‘I already invited her. Why, you two going together?’ She said it in a sweet voice. I told her no, I just wanted to know if she wanted to go. I was so embarrassed.”

You’re embarrassed, 12-year-old Arjewtino? How do you think reading this makes me feel?

I had picked him up at Dulles on Friday, bypassing the TSA security line with a special pass since his parents wanted me to meet him at the gate. While his flight disembarked, a Virgin America employee announced over the loudspeaker, “Will the parents of [my cousin] please come to the front?”

I started to walk forward when she saw me and continued on the loudspeaker, “…or the daddy?”

I got to the gate and started chatting with her. I mentioned that his parents had wanted me to meet him at the gate.

“Oh, you’re not the father?” she asked me.

“No, I’m the cousin,” I told her.

“Oh, I’m so sorry!”

“That’s ok,” I told her, “it’s perfectly conceivable that I could have a 12-year-old son.”

Yup, definitely not feeling old at all.

I ended up taking my cousin to the Nats game on Saturday. I was planning on buying some cheap $10 seats in the stratosphere, but when we got in line at the box office, some random dude came up to us and handed me tickets to two seats in the 131 section, three rows from the field.

“Just take them,” he said. I kept waiting for the catch but he walked away. The seats were tremendous. And though my cousin, who is from the San Francisco area, wore his Giants jersey which I threatened to trash, I wore my Dodgers jersey and we both put on Nats caps.

We stayed through the rain delay, eating chili dogs that looked like, according to my cousin, “barf”, and watching video games in the Playstation 3 center behind right-center field. I felt young, vibrant, like a kid again. Let’s see someone call me old now.

On our way out of the stadium, my cousin asked me for a bucket of cotton candy. I thought about how much I used to love cotton candy, how I used to beg my parents for some whenever we went to a carnival or a Dodgers game. Now, though, all I could do was wince.

My cousin looked at me and said, “You look like your dad.”

Yup. Not old at all.

There is a lot about becoming a father (someday) that fills me with hopeful bliss. Playing catch with my son and daughter. Watching them take their first steps. Teaching them that Jesus is magic.

But the one thing I am not looking forward to, the thing that fills me with dread, the thing that parents half-heartedly try to convince me isn’t so bad, is the potty training.

Look, I know it’s an unavoidable part of raising snot-nosed punks, but that doesn’t mean I want to go through it. Being 7 years older than my little brother, I still remember watching him cower in fear whenever he had to take a dump. He would claim he didn’t have to go, press his ass against the floor in denial, and scream like a little girl whenever I dragged him to the toilet.

I would have let him shit his pants for all I cared, but being the older brother meant more responsibility than just convincing him to trade me his best baseball cards.

But as a parent, you really have no choice. You have to step up and teach your kid what a crapper is and that it wont swallow you into the deep, dark recesses of hell. Still, the prospect is daunting.

Last year, while visiting my friends Zaimah and Sonny and their newborn son Rayban, I asked Sonny if his son ever took a whiz while he changed him. With Rayban lying on his back being extricated from a dirty diaper, he began to explain that it didn’t really happen often when, seemingly out of nowhere, Rayban let a stream of piss fly into the air.

I could not have been more startled if Rayban had started to climb the wall like a baby possessed. I ran to the other side of the room yelling “Why, God, why?!” as Sonny cussed up a storm and blamed me for planting the idea in his son’s head.

I have decided, in a very conscious way, what kind of dad I’m going to be, and it’s a lot like the dad in Calvin and Hobbes. My favorite strips were when Calvin’s dad would blatantly lie about things, like telling Calvin that old photographs were in black and white because in the old days, the world wasn’t in color. I liked the dad’s parenting strategy, one that says, “If you’re going to pay thousands of dollars to raise an ungrateful little shit, then you might as well fuck with them.”

I’m sure my parents applied this artifice on me. My mom used to tell me that if I ate my spinach I would become Popeye. Or that if I crossed my eyes when the wind was blowing it would stay that way. These lies, though, were told to get me to eat healthily and to stop me from sticking my head out of a moving car. I want lies to tell my kids for no better reason than it amuses me. Like, “Your Teddy bear and I hang out and chat when you’re asleep” or “Daddy is actually a pirate.”

Because you need to tell them something when they’re crying on the toilet.

PHOTO CREDIT via Neatorama.

“See, it doesn’t hurt anyone! Fuck, fuckety, fuck, fuck, fuck.” — Cartman, in South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut

Ever since I was a child and first heard the word mierda and hijo de puta (the mother of all Spanish profanity), I have been fascinated with cussing. Its etymology, its derivatives, its immediate ability to convey exactly what I’m feeling.

Luckily for me, some high school freshman named McKay Hatch has founded a club that might help where dirty looks and scolding reprimands have failed: the No Cussing Club.

McKay, probably in an ill-advised attempt to get back at his parents for saddling him with such a ridiculous first name, also got his hometown of South Pasadena this week to issue a proclamation outlawing foul language. And not a moment too soon.

If it’s not Jane Fonda saying the word “cunt” on morning TV it’s Diane Keaton uttering the word “fuck”. If it’s not a DC mayoral staffer getting fired for saying the perfectly innocuous word “niggardly” it’s parents washing their children’s mouth out with toxic soap on the show “Supernanny”.

Cursing is out of control in this country and the future of our impressionable children is finally in the capable hands of a kid barely into puberty.

Wait. Fuck this. What am I talking about? I love cursing! I don’t need to join any club. Phew!

Cursing is under attack, quickly becoming modern society’s easy scapegoat, the “violent video games” of the 90s. I have lately been reading story after story about how profanity is ruining civilization and corrupting society.

And that’s really too fucking bad. Because profanity might be the greatest method of communication we humans have ever come up with.

Cussing was originally restricted to the use of blasphemy, sacrilege or using the Lord’s name in vain. Luckily for us, it evolved into a multi-use means of expression, communication, and comedy gold. Imagine a world where George Carlin’s seven dirty words didn’t exist. Or where you had nothing to say during sex. Or where Bucky Dent ’s only middle name was “Earl”.

Cursing can be cathartic, colorful, witty, and necessary. It has been around as long as people have stubbed their toes into chairs and will be around as long as George W. Bush has a hot mic nearby.

So I really don’t understand why a kid with two last names felt it necessary to go around telling his hometown what to say. Or not say, really. McKay’s Web site dedicated to converting perfectly normal people into no-cussing androids. McKay features photos of its members and he even sells orange wrist bands like he’s Lance Fucking Armstrong.

The high school freshman explains on his site that he started this movement because his cuss-happy friends swore so much they didn’t even realize they were doing it. Also, colleges eat this shit up.

Through the No Cussing Challenge I realized that I could use POSITIVE PEER PRESSURE on my friends. If my friends could say no to cussing, how much easier will it be for them to say no to drugs, violence, and pornography.”

Studies have shown banning profanity from the workplace lowers morale. That forbidding it makes people say it more. And that, last time I checked, it has yet to bring a civilization to its knees.

Is cursing really such a huge issue that it requires attention from public resources? Couldn’t his high school have benefited more from a Don’t Get Pregnant or You’ll Fuck Up Your Life Club? Shouldn’t the school system make its lack of well-paid, highly qualified teachers a higher priority?

I think this girl named “chrissy” sums it up perfectly on a blog I found.

cussing is bad but you have todo it sometimes. i mean when someboby is annoying you you or you really hate somebody you feel like you have to. but if people think it is so bad like parents then why do they do it. if your older and you cuss it is not bad but if a kid does the room is silent. i feel that it is not bad at all. the president does it i bet.”

* MY blog post title is a paraphrase from a famous Groucho Marx quote that goes, “I don’t care to belong to a club that would accept someone like me as a member.”

“You’re not as much of an asshole as you used to be.”

These were my sister’s words to me this past weekend. My brother and I visited her in Portland, OR, an overdue trip paid for by my benevolent dad.

“Thanks”, I told her, “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

And I did consider it one. Because her assertion is true. Growing up as the oldest of three, I wasn’t always the nicest brother to my hermanita and hermano.

I once locked my sister, who is one year younger than me, in our large toy trunk and told my parents she ran away. They found her a few minutes later banging on the inside of the door, crying to be let out.

I also used to make my brother, who is 7 years younger than me, cry by telling him he was adopted and that our parents didn’t want him. I thought it was cute when he sobbed hysterically.

I have probably caused some serious emotional damage to my siblings. But the truth is, I love them more than anything, so it was great to spend the weekend in Portland with them, just the three of us, all grown up and matured by time.

I hadn’t been to Portland since I was 4-years-old. It was the first American city my family lived in after emigrating from Argentina. I have no real memories of the city, the only images a few photos of me playing in the playground of our first apartment complex.

My first morning in Portland, we met up with our cousin David, who is related distantly to us through a family tree too complicated to remember. Six years older than me, he told me that when I was a kid, I was a VERY excitable child and liked to run around all the time, constantly asking him for “horsey rides”. He even gave me a horsey ride for old times’ sake.

He remembered one time when my family went out for a fancy dinner. Dressed in some white suit (thanks, Ma) and obviously feeling stifled, I had run out of the house to the muddy playground, where I played in the rain-soaked swings and threw myself into a puddle of mud. Yeah, I was that kind of kid.

The weekend in Portland started with my sister picking up my brother, who lives in LA, and me at the airport. On the way home, we stopped at Carl’s Jr. (not Hardee’s) for a deliciously disgusting Western Bacon Cheeseburger meal.

My sister drove up to the window and paid the cashier, who gave her my soda. She handed it to me, put the car in drive, and hit the gas.

“Hermanita!” I yelled. “You forgot the food!”

She couldn’t back up since the car behind us had already started to move forward. So we made my brother get out and walk to the drive-thru window, where he stood for several minutes waiting for my food while we laughed our asses off inside the car.

“It’s going to be that kind of weekend,” I told my sister.

And it was. Though we see each other two or three times a year, this was the first time the three of us had hung out alone without either of our parents there to make sure we got along. We spent most of the time reminiscing with old stories, laughing at stupid things we said, making fun of each other like we did (and do) when we were children, and enjoying the very first American city we ever lived in.

Sometimes we would regress to childhood and tease each other and fart in each other’s faces. Other times, we demonstrated how mature we now are by discussing Portland’s real estate market.

On Saturday afternoon, we visited an aunt who lives in the rich area of Portland (West Hills, I think). I thought we were visiting a nice, old lady who would feed us snacks. As it turned out, I was half right.

Aunt Marjorie is an awesomely sassy broad who lives in the most beautiful house I have ever seen, overlooking the city, and who has volunteered at Planned Parenthood for decades.

She showed us around her mansion of a house and told us about her experiences touring middle and high schools educating kids about condoms. You haven’t lived until you meet a 70-year-old woman who talks about reservoir tips and dispelling the myth that Mountain Dew works as a form of birth control.

(I haven’t had even a sip of the Dew since I was a teenager, but I’m pretty sure this proved that Oregon kids are much more stupid than those from California.)

In the evening, we met up with Hermanita’s boyfriend Jandy and had an early birthday celebration for my brother at his favorite place: a sushi restaurant. The sushi was served on a revolving conveyor belt (called Kaitenzushi) and we managed to put away 31 plates between the four of us.

The next day, Sunday, we spent in downtown Portland. We started by going to Powell’s Bookstore, which claims to be “the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world”. The store, though not as charming as The Strand, was huge, taking up an entire city block and holding an impressive amount of books. It was overwhelming and I felt unprepared since I hadn’t printed out my “to-read” booklist from GoodReads. Still, I bought about $50 worth of books (low for me) that were on sale.

We then went to Voodoo Doughnuts, which sells unique and irreverently named donuts, like Cock-n-Balls, from what appears to be a former biker bar. They were out of bacon maple bars, so I ordered the Memphis Mafia, a chocolate chip/banana/peanut butter glaze that was the largest donut I had ever seen or eaten.

After dodging a donut-fused heart attack, we ventured to Portland’s Saturday Market. I exhausted my sister with “jokes” reminding her that we were attending something called Saturday Market on a Sunday.

Though I expected the market to be the same sort of fair of trinket and food crap, I was surprised by how unique it was. Especially the people. For example:

A man playing the guitar (well) with only half an arm

Some dude also playing the guitar, but with a cape and both of his arms. Cheater.

A bicyclist performing tricks on the street. I secretly wanted to see him fall on his face.

A Goth girl giving out hugs as part of the now-famous Free Hugs Campaign. The hug she gave me didn’t fill me with light and happiness. It made me feel awkward. If you’re going to give them out for free you better improve your technique, Goth Girl.

Afterwards, we walked to Rogue, a brewery where we sampled several local award-winning beers and I let my brother and sister beat me at Connect Four. Seriously, I fucking suck at this game.

We ate at a Thai place that night that featured sunken tables. Toward the end of the meal, a man’s table fell into the sunken area below him, crushing his legs as he struggled to free himself. The waitress helped him. And by “helped him”, I mean she went over, grabbed the glass of water, and walked into the kitchen.

Overall, I liked Portland much more than I thought I would. I got to spend time in the very first American city my family lived in and with my favorite people in the whole world who are younger than me. I also bought an 80-gig iPod, taking advantage of Oregon’s lack of sales tax and my brother’s vast iTunes library.

It even made up for having to wake up at 4am on Monday.

B32? What the hell kind of boarding number is that, Southwest Airlines? That better not be a middle seat.

My flight to Portland today is going to last seven hours. There is no way I’m riding bitch the whole way.

At least this girl isn’t flashing “301″.

PHOTO CREDIT

Lindsay Lohan’s freckles nearly killed the Internet this week.

Obama took command in the race for his party’s nomination. Fidel Castro resigned as head of Cuba. Something good — or bad — happened in Kosovo. A lunar eclipse even threatened to alert the rebel alliance to our Earthly location.

But the biggest news, especially for those men who remembered what it was like to be teenage boys and smartly invested their life savings into shares of Kleenex, was Lindsay’s homage to “The Last Sitting”, Marilyn Monroe’s final photo shoot before her death.

New York Magazine released these photos online on Tuesday, making all naked images that have ever been published of anyone anywhere completely irrelevant. In the photos, which have since been right-click-save-image-as’d faster than anything ever, Lohan is wearing a blond wig and is covered by a thinly veiled sheet.

Many responded positively to the photos. WWTDD called their online release “the greatest day for nerds since the creation of Spider Man.” Others weren’t so kind.

Monica Corcoran wondered why Lohan needed to channel Monroe, asking rhetorically, “…why are you bouncing in and out of rehab and re-creating a photo shoot that precisely mimics a suicidal woman’s last flirtation with fame?”

In any case, these photos, the publication of which at one point crashed the New York Magazine’s servers, have since taken a once-hot celebrity with questionable self-control yet above-average acting ability and thrust her back into the public conscience and masturbatory fantasies.

But lost amid the teenage-boy-crushing and the spiteful-woman-hating was this — a complete and utter contempt of Lindsay’s freckles.

“She looks harsh, contrived, and is much too freckly to convey the soft artistry that she is aiming for,” wrote a commenter on a Washington Post live chat yesterday.

Too freckly? Too freckly? Since when does a genetically predisposed body’s ability to produce melanin in clusters a sign of imperfection?

The Superficial (fittingly) wrote:

“I don’t want to say Lindsay Lohan has a lot of freckles, but I don’t remember Marilyn Monroe having a topographical map across her chest.”

And some Einstein, on some online forum I now can’t remember, wrote:

“she realy gots a lot of frackels…that’s really ugly man… all over her body”

Growing up, I had freckles. A lot of freckles. And “frackels”. All across my face. I was what one might call “too freckly”.

My sister, who looked like my twin until later in life, always loved her freckles and even bragged about how many she had. I, however, tried to hide from them and felt deeply insecure about the way I looked. I would ask my mom if they would ever go away, but she would tell me she hoped they never did. Of course, moms have to say that.

I know a lot of people who do and did have freckles. The Princess’s freckles return every summer when the sun kisses her face across her nose, like a warm, brown strip that hugs her cheeks. When I asked her if she was ever insecure about having freckles as a child, she says she wasn’t — of course, she didn’t have too many.

My freckles did eventually fade, though their presence traumatized me enough that I still see them on my face whenever I look in the mirror.

But why are freckles considered ugly? I know I am not alone here since most people have had some amount of freckling at some point in their lives. And not everyone has had Pippi Longstocking’s overinflated self-esteem.

The lasting effect Lindsay’s naked body may have on our culture, after the zeitgeist moves on to the latest celebrity nude photos and these images fade from public consumption, is a return to hating freckles.

Or maybe there will be a reverse effect and people freckles will make a comeback. Maybe people will start painting or tattooing them on their faces and bodies. Maybe it will become the next “in” thing. That would be great.

Just don’t make them too freckly.