A popular blog, Dooce.com, opened up its comments on Sunday evening for readers to post their most embarrassing moments. Within 24 hours, there were more than 400 replies, evoking reactions from “Why was he embarrassed by this?” to “Oh no, on her priest?” I wasted more time than I’d like to admit reading through these confessions and vignettes, and I began thinking about how infrequently I feel humiliated these days. Even when I experience something that would have sent me into hiding for several days were I to experience it during high school — say, a ridiculously clumsy pratfall on the Goldwin-Smith staircase that culminates in sliding across the landing on my stomach while people around me gasp in horror — I merely stand up, brush the dust and literary magazines off of my coat, and continue on my way, silently formulating how I will tell the story in order to maximize its hilarity. Goodbye, “How will I ever set foot in public again?” Hello, “How can I work this into next week’s column?”

Take this story, for example. At the start of this past winter break, I went home with my boyfriend to meet his family for the first time. I was understandably apprehensive, and spent the entire six-hour bus ride chewing my fingernails and repeatedly questioning the boyfriend about whether there were any conversational topics I should be careful to avoid broaching (”You’re sure nobody in your family has ever been injured by an errant lima bean?”).

As it turns out, my fears were unfounded; his family was extremely hospitable, and I’m not just saying that because they read my column occasionally. But there was one little incident. After several hours, the lengthy bus ride coupled with the three or four glasses of water I had gulped down nervously meant that I was experiencing a rather urgent need to use the facilities. At last I could wait no longer, and I politely asked where the bathroom was located. I followed their directions, did what I had to do and flushed the toilet.

And the water level started rising.

The peculiar brand of terror you feel when you’re watching some unstoppable chain reaction swelled up in the pit of my stomach. The water level continued to rise.

I began to panic. Though we’d had our fair share of toilet problems in my poorly-plumbed apartment, it had always been my Midwestern housemate who did the dirty work while us city gals stood around and asked (rhetorically, of course) if there was anything we could do to help. I knew I was supposed to take the top off the tank and pull some sort of lever, so I heaved the heavy porcelain lid away and hoped that whatever I was supposed to do would be obvious. It wasn’t. I pushed my sleeves up and began frantically yanking on anything I could grab.

The water was still rising.

I finally admitted defeat. Between bouts of hysterical laughter, I told my boyfriend what had happened. His father plunged the toilet (which, I must point out in order to absolve myself of all guilt, apparently “does that all the time”). And my visit continued as planned, although I made a point of using the other bathroom from then on.

I don’t think it’s merely my penchant for amusing people with tales of my follies that makes me impervious to embarrassment; most people develop a resistance to humiliation as they get older. There were many common themes that ran throughout the posts on Dooce.com: most of them involved bodily functions or public nudity, quite a few of them occurred while drunk and there was usually a crush or significant other nearby. But the most noticeable theme by far was that the embarrassee was nearly always in high school at the time of his embarrassment.

This isn’t surprising; self-consciousness peaks during the high school years. David Elkind, a child development specialist, coined the term “adolescent egocentrism” to describe a pattern of cognition during adolescence that includes the “imaginary audience,” wherein a teen assumes that everyone else is as interested in him as he himself is, and that his every move is being scrutinized by the people around him.

Though I wonder just how much of the audience is imaginary, I wish that someone had told me about this in middle school. “You’re not as interesting as you think you are,” they could have said, “and everyone else pretty much ignores you. So don’t worry about doing stupid things, because nobody is going to care about it as much as you do.” This could have saved me — and countless teenagers across the country — a lot of grief.

I remember the first time I began to emerge from the funk of adolescent egocentrism. It was, appropriately enough, at my high school graduation; I had been misguidedly chosen as one of the two voices in a short duet of “Both Sides Now” (which had barely edged out a reading of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in the “best way to depress all the graduating seniors” contest). As I walked to the microphone, heart beating out “It’s not too late to take a swan dive off the stage and get taken away in a stretcher” in Morse code, I suddenly realized: nobody, absolutely nobody out of the 1500-odd people there, actually cared what I did. What I did, of course, was flub the song — and then I laughed and strode back to my seat. There would be no humiliation that day.

(The day I got a dandelion stuck up my nose when I was three and had to be taken to the hospital, however, is another story.)