Since the age of six, I wanted to be a teenager. What can I say? I was impressionable. TV shows like Beverly Hills, 90210 made me want to forsake the sandbox for a life full of boys, drama and drugs.  When I finally began high-school,  I became obsessive about keeping a journal of all my youthful activities. My first kiss, first drug experience, every meltdown: it was all written about in tireless detail. Reading the entries now, I’m not sure whether to laugh or hold back tears. It makes sense, considering that as a teenager, I flip-flopped exclusively between those two feelings anyway. See for yourself.

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Although I’ve only been out of my teens for three years, the early ’00′s now almost feel archaic. Blogs like Xanga and Livejournal were around but Myspace didn’t start until my junior year of high-school. And websites like Facebook or Twitter were unfathomable (Thank God.)  So one of the few outlets for my narcissism was a dingy old webcam that I would use to take grainy pictures of myself in various states of distress.  On the bottom, there’s a picture of my sister, her friend and I posing for the cam in our edgy glasses. At that point, my sister had just come back from Hampshire college and had turned me on to alternative bands like Built To Spill and Belle & Sebastian. Besides introducing me to life beyond Third Eye Blind, she also got me stoned for the very first time. Basically, she was bomb.com and I envied she and her friends because while they went out dancing in L.A., I would be stuck at home watching old episodes of Dawson’s Creek and waiting for, like, my life to start. I cherished any moment she included me in her super cool crazy teenage life.

This picture was taken on one of  the many nights I spent getting “drunk” with  my best friend, Becky. At 17, getting drunk entailed taking two sips of a Screwdriver and spending the rest of the night fake falling down on my floor and drunk-dialing friends. I was so sober, it was retarded. In fact, I didn’t even get drunk until I was a senior in high-school but shhhh! Don’t tell 17 year-old me. He doesn’t care what you say; he’s totally fucked up.

Eventually, I traded in my webcam for a polaroid camera. And that’s when shit got real.

This polaroid is from one of my first photo shoots, in which, Becky and I tried to create spontaneous cool poses for the camera. My mother, AKA Annie Leibowitz, was behind the lens capturing this very candid moment.

One day, i had a painting party where my friends and I sketched while listening to Simon & Garfunkel records. It was as boring as it sounds.

When I wasn’t  busy creating pretentious activities for the sake of photo documentation, I was forcing my friends into bizarre artsy poses for a Myspace default picture.

I went to fly kites in the park one day with friends because it seemed so cute and precious. As it turned out, flying a kite is super tedious. But I knew it would photograph really well and that everyone would be jealous of us.

In this picture, I’m doing a serious homage to the cover of Cat Power’s album, You Are Free.

I totally hated this girl in high-school but sometimes we would ham it up for the camera because we just looked so cute together in pix.

I remember this day well. After school, I bought weed from my 14 year-old neighbor, got stoned and went to the mall to go on a blind date at California Pizza Kitchen with an aging Starbucks barista. Posing with the Easter Bunny didn’t seem so weird, comparatively.

MORE TO COME.