I totally dug those diaries out of the trash. I’m still getting rid of them, obv. I just…I can’t explain why I wanted MORE PAIN, but I did.
Okay, I have here my VERY FIRST journal entry EVER. It’s, like, blogging 8-tracks. I was 11 years old.
Swistle, age 11
I think my mom bought the journal for me at a yard sale, and I was using one of those pens that has blue AND black AND red AND green at the push of various buttons:
Yesterday Melanie invited me to a sleepover. I went right after school and we had lots of buttery popcorn and soft drink after supper. We started off today with a walk, then we went swimming in their pool. We stayed in from 7:45 in the morning to 3:45 in the afternoon with breaks for lunch. I am very sunburnt, quite sleepy, and very sunsoaked.
So first off you can see that I’ve ALWAYS had a problem with overusing the word “very,” and it must be comforting to see how little people change over twenty-five a few years.
But here’s the problem: the two INTERESTING things that happened at this sleepover, I didn’t write down. The first was that the walk we started out the day with–that healthful walk in the fresh morning air–was a walk out to Melanie’s brother’s p0rrnn stash in the woods. First p0rrnn I had ever seen. I’d considered myself a woman of the world because I’d seen a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalog or two, but YIPES. I was so shocked, the one photo we looked at is burned into my brain. (We only looked at one, then walked away fast, pretending to be cool with it.)
And the second interesting thing was that the neighbor girl we swam in the pool all day with was a teenager, and she was the first girl I’d ever seen with underarm hair, and furthermore she must have had a good two to three inches of it. She floated on her back with her hands behind her head, and her underarm hair WINGED OUT to the sides. I was fascinated. Adding up all the peeks, I must have spent two good solid hours staring at her underarms that day.
And do I mention any of this in my secret, private diary? No, I do not. I tell about the POPCORN, for the love of pete. It was BUTTERY, apparently.
Ten days go by before I write my second post entry. I take the opportunity to announce a crush on David. I give two justifications for this crush:
- He respects and is nice to girls.
- He’s cute. He has wavy brown hair and freckles.
And looking back on it, David was indeed a wise choice. For one thing, he was THE ONLY BOY IN MY CLASS. So, you know, he BETTER respect and be nice to girls, considering how OUTNUMBERED he is. He really was cute, though. I emphasized this by switching ink colors (I’d been using black) to put a red heart after my reasons.
This journal is the kind with lined pages on one side and blank on the other, so I have drawn a picture of my fish. I have labeled them with their names; evidently their names were Cleo and Martha. I’ve also drawn the little fish net, but I messed it up the first time and tried to be all subtle and cazh about the mess-up (on the first page!! aaaagh!!!) by drawing an arrow to it and labeling it “Doodle.” So my future self would know it was NOT a mess-up but in fact a carefully planned doodle, deliberately drawn next to a successful drawing of a fish net.
Oh Swistle, I love you SO much! Those goldfish? PERFECT.
This is totally cracking me up. Hilarious!
That is so something I would have done if I’d messed up.
*Must find and destroy all diaries*
Oh, Swistle. We SO would have been friends when we were 11.
I am going to be laughing over “doodle” all DAY. It is exactly the sort of thing I would have done. You are TOO funny.
HAHAHAHHAHAHAHA. So awesome.
I probably would’ve talked about the popcorn too. I mean, come on – it was buttery!
Man, are you SURE about getting rid of them? I mean, these seem like real gems… maybe in another 10 years you will find other equally funny things in them….
In any case, this is cracking me up. It’s very similiar to my own “diary” days. My first diary had a lock on it. =)
Makes me think of my first diary. The kind with a lock on it? And I was 7 and talked about how late I was staying up to write and my own goldfish. They died often and I wrote and drew long memorials for them. Ahh…youth. ;)
That cracked me up. But you didn’t even mentiont he “quite sleepy” That had me laughing
ahahahahahahahahaha! so funny! for the record, i think you should keep them. your kids would adore reading through them in 30 years.
HAAAAA! Love the “doodle”. Very awesome.
Ha!
I remember going with my next-door neighbor girl friend into her basement to look at her dad’s
“deer hunting magazines.” Nevermind we lived in an urban area outside NYC and no one was deer hunting. What a crappy excuse.
And still, that first image I saw is also burned into my brain.
As if I didn’t love you already.
Oh, you dumpster diver, you!
Winging pit hair?! Holy crap! I’m surprised she was so cool with it. How funny! I would have been fascinated, too. Actually, I probably still would be, since you certainly don’t see THAT very often!
oh god… totally cringing right now because i definitely would have done that :-)
i started my first diary a few days before starting 3rd grade a new school. i’d been in an all-girls catholic school up until that point. so one of my first entries was about how the boys at my new school? talk about different things, “like ‘dicks,’ those sorts of things.”
i had NO IDEA what the word meant.
This made me laugh out loud. Very hard.
Now I’ve got to get to my parent’s house and make sure all the incriminating evidence of my poor writing skills and self absorbtion has been destroyed.
I love you, Swistle! And I love 11 year old Swistle. 15 year old Swistle might make me cringe, but only in that “hello, I KNOW you” way….so that’s a cringe factor of like infinity.
This is priceless. I can’t get that image of the floating underarm hair out of my mind.
When I wrote in my diary in middle school, I was very self-conscious and always felt as though what I was writing would someday be read by other people. Therefore I wrote nothing of substance. Maybe you were the same way?
There was only one boy in your class? One? Were all the other boys out planting the back 40 or something? Sailing the globe with the Merchant Marines? Too busy collecting porn to go to school? I am perplexed.
Just…hilarious. I periodically (read: every time) titled a page in my diary “Doodles”, complete with eyes in the “oo” of that word and a nose and mouth beneath, for my doodling.
love it!!!
“future self”…
and of course you didn’t write about what REALLY happened…. b/c you knew deepdown that your family might find it and read it.
smart girl.
b/c i cussed like a sailor in my cabbage patch diary with no lock. i coulda been soooo in trouble.
ha. wish i still had it.
omg. These could not be any funnier. I would have loved your 11 year old self’s blog back in the day. You know, if there were blogs then.
I may have to dig up my old diaries some day. I may not get brave enough to share any of it though, the parts I remember are rather lame.
Oh how I loved writing in those journals! I have pages of doodles and lots of entries about David as well (him being the only boy and everything…). I am now emotionally damaged to know that Melanie’s brother had a porn stash…..
Thank GOD my tween journals no longer exist. Adult me would DIE if she had to read Tween me’s journals!
I am loving these diary entries so much too – I don’t have ALL of mine, but enough so that if I ever wanted to spend an afternoon cringing, I’d have plenty of reading material to do it. In one from my 12th birthday, I described a family trip to Disney and wrote about how my favorite ride was the “Pepol Mover”. The scary part is Spelling was one of my academic strengths. Then one from 9th grade talks about how mad I got at my friend Barbara for buying the exact same Espirit sweatshirt as mine. That hasn’t changed; I still get upset when my friends copy my amazing fashion choices.
“A doodle. I do doodle. You, too! You do doodle too!”
What a great word. I feel a sudden kinship to you, because not only are we close in age, but I also had the same switchable red, blue, green, and black pen. And I painstakingly changed colors to emphasize points in my diaries.
Scary thing…no idea what happened to my diaries. They quite possibly could be tucked away in boxes in my parents basement. I feel the sudden need to seek them out and verify waht I did or did not admit to!
LOL!! I remember I had a diary in kindergarden and I used to draw pictures of houses in it- not sure why other than the fact that I liked to draw houses. One day when I was riding the bus home from school the “big kids” asked to look at my diary- AND I SHOWED THEM (idiot!) and they all made fun of me for drawing houses in my diary. Who knew that wasn’t “appropriate” diary fodder? I was FIVE! I could BARELY write my name for Pete’s sake.
OMG! I love this! I used to keep a diary. I believe (and hope) I through out all of them. LOL. My entries would be close to yours. I love the more “detailed” scoop on the days that you wrote on this blog. Isn’t life funny to look back on? Maybe that’s why we, as adults, blog….
I haven’t laughed this hard all day. I totally used to do the arrow thing…apparently for my future self. Also, once my mother gave me a sweet note about how special I was to her and how proud of me she was. I actually wrote a response on it…before stashing it in my memory box. I believe my addition went something like, “Thanks, Mom. I really needed someone to believe in me.” Oh, vomit. And since I didn’t show my mother my response…why write it at all?
I would totally keep these diaries, so someday when you are really really worried that Elizabeth has moved into crazy-land, you can remind yourself that you, too, lived there in your teenage years…and she will come out of it a normal, non-dramatic, socially acceptable human being.
i think 11 year old you and 11 year old me might’ve been some kind of soul mates!
Winging pit hair?
TEARS of laughter, I tell you, TEARS.
And I agree with the other commenter, I would be sneaking peeks even now.
Maybe you could just save a few doodles and entries, to piece together for memory’s sake? Certainly it will give you a few more laughs over the years. Imagine 80 year old Swistle finding them again, then finding the 50-year old blog post, and chuckling about it all.
I think you should do a diary series here for a few weeks, I just love these kinds of posts! Not to mention, then if you do throw them away, they’ll still be here for you to remember!
You know what I think is hilarious and interesting at the same time? That you TOTALLY REMEMBER the two interesting things that happened that weren’t in the diary.
I don’t really know how to explain what I’m thinking but like, all these years later, you STILL remember the day more clearly than you wrote about it.
It’s like a behind-the-scenes of your own mind.
Maybe in the diary of my life, one day I can draw an arrow and the word “Doodle” next to my first husband.
This is blogging gold! You can’t throw these away. Stash them somewhere and whenever you don’t know what to write about–bring out the goods!
and I don’t know you wrote that comment a bout their first husband, but I’m dying over here—too too funny!
I’m telling ya… you canNOT throw these journals away. They’re too hilarious. And I love how you actually remembered that sleepover and what happened. Without writing it down.
Oh, and ummm I love those pens. Notice I didn’t use a past tense there. Know where I can find one, or did they stop making them in the late 80s?
I think I love you even more, with this glimpse of your tween self! I never could keep up with a diary…I did okay in college, but oh help me Jesus, I do NOT want to reread those!
I had a goldfish named Cleo, too! My brother’s was named MacGyver, which I thought was pretty cute, even when we were kids.
LOL! I absolutely loved reading this especially the adult comments. Think I might follow in your footsteps. Don’t think that I ever liked a guy simply JUST because he respects women.