May 2004 | I hate the past

At some very naive time in the recent past, I proposed the idea of republishing excerpts from my junior high diary for a little nostalgic levity. Said diaries arrived in a box this afternoon from distant Southern lands peopled by my attic-purging parentals, and I X-acto'd the box open to find 35 encyclopedic tomes of my repressed humiliations from age 12 to 25.

The first is indeed the worst, as I unearthed the broken-locked, horse-covered initial volume of the grueling series, which begins on a summer day in 1984.

A portrait emerges of an emotionally infantile, dishonest, and contradictory C-list junior high kid from the suburbs who hates, in turn, her parents, cat, brother, bitch *@!! ass friends, school, and every living human, with the following schoolgirl crush exceptions from '84 to '85:

• Chekov, the suave Russian ensign from Star Trek
• Josh Koenig, his real life son, because this seemed to make more sense, agewise
• Richard Chamberlain, in his vestment-ripping Thorn Bird years
• Mason Capwell, black sheep eldest son of the Capwell clan on Santa Barbara
• A boy from my core class who I would not dare name lest Julie find out and think I was totally stupid, although this only lasted for one day although I understood what true love was from this experience
• David Letterman, in his throwing shit off the roof years
• Brad Piper, the jerky friend of the insufferable, snake-killing Ricky who was the son of my parent's friends
• Tim, the core class bully's side kick who actually talked to me one day
• Jason, the guy who was sort of cute but unfortunately not unpopular, from science class
• Frisco on General Hospital
• Don Johnson
• Sean Donnely from General Hospital
• Huey Lewis (and soon thereafter, various members of the News)
• Spock
• B-list TV movie actor Mark Harmon
• An anonymous kid code named Opurt (a subversive Bloom County reference) who left me secret notes under the desk in my math class but who I never actually met
• Kirk Cameron, but only for a day

So there you have it. There was not a printable sentence in the entire 35 volume series. However I can tell you that the following thing is true of junior high life for a C-list girl: you hate all of your friends if you have any and they all hate you. Friendship is a game of trying to make each girl feel like she is an anvil on the collective popularity prospects of the other friends. You spend your spare time numbing your mind on basement-level pop culture entertainment, and return to school the next day for more abuse, unless you could manage to pretend you were sick, which is a skill I honed with surgical precision throughout my school years.

Enter high school, which is basically more of the same for the first few years, until you become, in my case, a jaded upperclassman who basically never goes to class and barely graduates in a show of hippie-earringed, Beatle-lyric scribbling fuck-you bravado. Go to college, meet arrogant, manic-panic hair dyed indie wannabes, repeat.

The whole thing is a fu****g nightmare, plus, you have no money throughout the whole ordeal. So Abercrombie and Fitch and other purveyors of youth zombie idealism can cram their f***** lies up their &^%$#*@# f****** BLEEEEEP. I put those god damned diaries in the attic where they belong. It's good to be 32.

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