May 29, 1991

I am in English class again (another loose leaf transfer). I went to the eye doctor this morning, the eye infection is still there. Got some ointment. It seems pretty good. I won’t put eye drops in but it’s a kind of gel that you put in the eye (gross). Well I’ll see how it feels. Jane is going to break up with her boyfriend. I think that’s good. I don’t like being single when she’s not. Crystal’s grad ceremony tomorrow.

                                      Ugh, I’m so ashamed of how petty and jealous I was about Jane. I was such a terrible friend. I still am actually. I mean I’m not petty and envious anymore but I’m very limited in how many people I can care about at any given time. According to science we all are, and the average person can only handle about five close friendships at a time, but I think my number is one. If I’m hanging out with a specific person then I’m very attentive to them, but out of sight, out of mind.

June 11, 1991

Crystal’s ceremony was nice. I screamed but she didn’t hear. The Sunday next my eye got swollen, went to eye doctor following thursday, got drops, is getting better. I also have to put warm compresses on it (eye, left). Jane dumped Kyle ’cause he was a “mama’s little boy”. I met Luba last Saturday! She is neighbour’s friend. I went over and got her autograph. Nancy Fontaine invited me to the 6th grade reunion on the 15th (Saturday). I’m gonna call Marlène and ask if she can come down for it. I hope I can bring Jane too.

                                       I wasn’t even a fan of Luba’s. I guess I just liked the idea of meeting a celebrity. I have very much gotten over that since then. In fact, meeting Luba was so unremarkable that it may have cured me of celebrity worship.

June 25, 1991

The reunion was pretty boring. I could have lived without going. Marlène didn’t come. I didn’t call her ’cause she had a performance the next day. Jane went to New York. The good thing about all of that was that at the McDonald’s I got a “43” penny in change. Wow.

                                      I collected pennies. I still have the collection, which I keep in a little gum ball machine. Pennies were discontinued in Canada about a year ago so maybe the collection will eventually be worth something… or become and increasingly obsolete paper weight.

It’s Crystal’s prom tomorrow and Mom and Dad’s anniversary (21 years). We are going to eat out and then Mom and Dad are going to Crystal’s prom for 30 minutes while Keith and I lounge around the lounge. (heh, heh).

                                   In Canada, or at least in Montreal, prom is actually called grad ball, and it’s not exactly like what you see on American TV shows. Parents show up for a while to dance with their kids and then the kids do their own thing. My sister’s grad ball was at the Ritz so that’s what I meant by lounge in the lounge. I also ended up making an appearance at my brother’s grad ball but I never went to my own because 1993 was pretty much my peak of depression and self-loathing. It’s interesting that this diary entry is so stark, and point-form, as opposed to an exploration of how I was feeling. I think it’s an indication that the depression was beginning. Good times. 

May 28, 1991

I am so tired I could die. I wrote this in English class and am now transferring it to my diary. We did the Endurance run today. 2nd period and boy am I tired. Even now that it’s 4th period I’m still tired. At least I’m not sweating like was in ITT (3rd period). I walked a lot of it but still we had to go around 6 times. I finished after the bell rang. It was pretty embarrassing. I collapsed when I was done and started crying ’cause I couldn’t take it. And I’m not even sure how many times I went around.

                                           I vividly remember this. I’ve even written about it before on this blog, without realizing a first-hand account lay hidden within the pages of my old diary.

I often wish I wasn’t anemic. I wish I had energy and I wish I was a fast runner and good in sports and an all around good athlete. I wish I didn’t get eye infections. I really wish I had 20/20 vision. Sometimes I wish my skin wasn’t so pale (but sometimes I like it because it makes me different). I wish I was pretty. I wish my fat was in the right places (ahem). I wish I wasn’t so shy. I wish boys liked me. But I like myself, if I had the chance (except for having 20/20 vision and not being fat, I’d stay the same except for the skin rashes).

                                         This last part was scratched out and then rewritten elsewhere on the page. I can’t tell what I’d originally written. But I can tell you that none of those wishes ever came true. My sight began to weaken when I was about four years old; too young to be able to express what was going on. My mother thought I was going crazy because I told her I could see angels. Turns out I was trying to tell her I could see halos, i.e. lens flares. Eventually she figured it out and brought me to an optometrist and I got glasses. My sight continued to deteriorate so I had to get new glasses every year. When I was about ten I got contacts and when I was fourteen or fifteen I got my first eye infection so it was back to the glasses. I finally sought out eye surgery when I was thirty-three, but my vision was too poor to be a candidate for lasik so I got intraocular lens implant surgery, which is a whole other story for another time. The skin rash I refer to is eczema, and that also merits its own post because it relates to my distrust of doctors.

What I really wish is that I lived in a place just like Star Trek: The Next Generation. With all the people, just like in the show. But I’d settle for being a regular on the show. Oh life is so depressing! If they do the Endurance run at BHS I will try to get out of it somehow!

                                         I was obsessed with TNG, and I fantasized about living on the Enterprise all the time, but I was also realistic enough to know such a thing could never be, so in an effort to make my fantasies more attainable I fantasized about being an actor on the show. So, about 1% more attainable. Really, I just wanted any escape from my life, but it would take at least another decade for me to learn that I really wanted to escape myself, and still another decade to learn that what I actually needed was self-acceptance. The good news is that my next school, BHS, did not, in fact, enforce the endurance run.

 

Am I a bitch?

I’ve already explored whether or not I’m a hater and concluded that I must be an asshole if people perceive me as such. So I’m certainly a bitch in the sense that people have called me a bitch, and many people think of me as a cold-hearted Wednesday Addams type.

But is it fair to refer to me as a bitch? What have I done that is so bitchy? What does bitch even mean? Literally, it means a female dog, and apparently, back in the 14th century, it meant a woman with high sexual desire, as in a “bitch in heat”. Today it tends to be used as an all-purpose insult for women. Any woman who is bossy, or uppity, or assertive, or daring to behave in ways that are traditionally considered masculine, is called a bitch. And those sexist connotations are why I take such issue with the word. Calling a woman a bitch means she’s acting like a man in a way that is unacceptable in mainstream society and calling a man a bitch is calling him a woman, which is, of course, the gravest of insults.

So I do bristle when I’m called a bitch, even if it’s usually meant jokingly, perhaps because it is meant jokingly. Why is it funny to call a woman a bitch? But there’s also a part of me that embraces the label, as many feminists do, in a “taking it back” kind of way, because a bitch is a woman in control of her life, and bitches get stuff done.

But there’s also the concern that people are calling me a bitch because they think I’m mean. As I’ve discussed, I often come across more negatively than I intend. But once again, I’m forced to wonder if a man behaving in similar ways would be judged so harshly for such behaviour. When a man acts dismissively, it’s the other person’s fault for wasting his time, but when I do it I’m not being open to other people’s opinions. When a man looks at his phone instead of chatting with people, he’s considered busy, but when I do it I’m unfriendly. Could I stand to be more empathetic to others? Sure. But so could most men who have swallowed our society’s programming on how to be successfully male. Why don’t we have a nasty word for men who are bossy, assertive, aggressive, dismissive, and unfriendly? I guess there’s the word “dick”, which is often used as an insult towards men. And that word is indeed problematic because it implies that penises are inherently bad. I take similar issue with the word “cunt” being used as an insult. And I’m especially annoyed by the word “pussy” being used to mean weak, while “balls” denote courage. How does that make sense? When men are kicked in the testicles they act as though the world has ended, while vaginas regularly excrete one’s uterine lining in a rather painful process, and women just get on with it. And yet women are the weak ones?

Now allow me to return to the word “bitch”, and its casual overuse. I especially hate the insult “son of a bitch” because it doesn’t insult the person it’s meant to be insulting. Instead, it insults his mother. I still, for reasons we won’t go into here, watch Supernatural, even though it is deeply problematic in its treatment of both women and men (I think largely due to poor writing resulting from ignorant sexism, rather than malevolent misogyny), but they throw around the term “son of a bitch” like it’s a meaningless adjective. But it’s a very loaded term. It implies that the person at fault is the mother of the villain, rather than the villain himself. It lets men off the hook entirely and places all blame on women. If you think I’m overreacting to a simple word, then you’ve probably used that word before, without fully considering how hurtful it can be. Or you knew exactly how hurtful it would be and your intention was to hurt, in which case you’re the bitch big ol’ meany pants.