Category: This day in…

Flashbacks to old journal entries with modern commentary, because torture

December 10, 1992

September 18, 2017

I can’t wait ’till x-mas vacation. Only 6 more school days.

                         I still count down to vacay.

Isn’t it strange how I can only fantasize in the privacy of my own house (usually my room, sometimes TV room) when there’s no one else around? It’s like I’m afraid the people around me will read my thoughts.

                       I wasn’t talking about erotic fantasies or anything. Just regular melancholy wishing.

Once again I’m in Whitmore’s class, supposed to be writing an essay due Monday that I haven’t even started yet. I never write in my diary anymore. I only write on papers and insert them in. I should really rewrite the shorter ones or this diary won’t be able to close. I’m gonna have so much to do this x-mas vacation. I have so much to do before x-mas vac. In my last class I had the hiccups mondo time and now my stomach is grumbling an 8.5 on the Richter scale. STAR TREK TNG was one of my fave episodes last night – the one about the time loop thing. So cool! As usual Data saves the day. I’ve been thinking about a STAR TREK show that my bro and I invented. It will be called STAR TREK: THE CONTINUING MISSION. Cool, eh?

                      Yeah, super cool bro. And why did I continuously all caps ‘Star Trek’ in this entry? 

AAAAAGGG my stomach hurts! I’ve gotta buy a couple candy grams. I complain about it but I like receiving them, it’s a good feeling to know that people care enough about you to send you a 35¢ candy cane via homeroom mail. Sounds cheesy, and I guess it is. I don’t even like candy canes! I’m getting three as far as I know, so I’ll put them on the tree! Our tree’s nice I think. I did most of the decorating. I wish I had a gift exchange to do (not school wise of course). Mom’s doing one at work, the lunch table people are doing one. Keith’s doing one (even though it is class room wise) I wanna give and get. Oh well I guess I’ll just have to wait ’till x-mas. I just heard someone say that candy grams are not a measure of popularity. Of course they are! Everything in school is either a measure of popularity or academic achievement (both very unjustly weighed). I’m pathetic. I just realized I’m truly the queen of pathetic. I have no life outside of Star Trek, school, and drawing, ya know? I’ll never make it after school. I’ll never be independent. Most of all I’ll never be famous or meet my crush. I might as well face it, I’ll never meet him. Never in all my life will I ever know him. Never. I’m pathetically pitiful. I’m sitting here, writing to myself, supposed to be writing something I don’t get, and I’m not, and will never be, even significant enough to be counted as a statistic. I don’t matter at all. None of my dreams will ever come true. I’ll die young and loveless and pathetic. Life is just a bunch of lies. We lie to our friends, family, peers, authority figures, those over who we have authority, our environment, even ourselves. I’m a fake, do I know anyone who isn’t a fake? How could I know? Only the bad fakes are revealed to me. With all this, I still go on. Why do I go on? To spare grief to those I love? Why bother? I’m not sparing it, just delaying it. So I can see how the world turns out? Partly, but who cares how it will turn out once I’m dead? So I don’t miss out on all the things I want see and do? Partly, but I’ll never do them anyway, I’ll just give myself more grief. Then why do I keep on living? Fear, that’s why. Because I’m afraid. Not afraid to die, but afraid to live but also afraid not to live. I’m afraid I’ll lose the only thing I ever really had. I’m afraid to end my life, because after I turn over that point there is no turning back, no remedy for the situation. Of course once I’m dead I’ll never know the difference anyway but as I’m alive, I’m too scared to take that chance. Well, I seem to have run out of space, so I’ll reread this now and surprise myself with my own insight and realisticness. 

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November 30, 1992

September 11, 2017

I’m totally bored. I hate school. I hate people. I don’t hate TV. I don’t hate movies. I don’t hate drawing. I hate going to school and being at school and being on the bus and the people on the bus and the people at school. I hate Mr. Whitmore, I hate Jane, I hate everyone but my mother and brother, and Beau Gars. (my celebrity crush). I hate school. I hate all my classes. Sometimes I hate myself, not now. I  really hate Mr. Whitmore, I seriously wish he would die. I wish I could kill him. I wish I were Q. I WISH I WERE Q. I hate my life. I am so full of hate and have no way to release it. How can I release it? Maybe I’ll make a voodoo doll of Whitmore. Yeah! I wish I were Q.

                                  Yeah, so that pretty much covers that. Kind of interesting that I never hated my mother, eh? Way to eschew teenaged girl stereotypes. 

                              Mr. Whitmore was my English teacher. At one point he called on me, to comment on something in a book the class was reading, and I took my time formulating my answer, apparently too long, because he got pissed and yelled at me, and the entire class, that we must answer questions, and not simply sit there in silence. I was utterly humiliated, and that moment has remained seared in my brain as one of the most embarrassing in all of high school. I don’t remember the timelines, so I don’t know if this happened before or after, but another time, he asked me to comment on another book, and I quite honestly replied that the book had made me realize that I’d never been happy. Even though I knew this was an embarrassing thing to say, I said it anyway because I knew it would shock him, and shut him up. Even though I was indeed embarrassed, I got the desired effect, because he stammered in response, hesitantly asking the rest of the class if anyone had a similar reaction. No one responded, because of course they didn’t, but to this day I retain that as a moment of triumph over an asshole of an authority figure. In retrospect though, he wasn’t that bad. I actually had a bit of a love/hate relationship with Mr. Whitmore. I also had him for Drama, and I was basically teacher’s pet in that class. He once said, to the whole class, that I was the only student who ever understood what he was talking about. So that was nice.

                         When I say I wish I were Q, I’m of course talking about the Star Trek character, not the Bond character. I no longer wish I were omnipotent, ’cause that’d be boring, but I still love Star Trek. I’m recapping TNG these days, so head on over and check it out.

encounter-at-farpoint-04

November 10, 1992

September 4, 2017

Tuesday:
2:30 – 3:00 – take shower, blah, blah, blah
3:00 – 4:00 – watch Joan Rivers show
4:00 – 5:00 – watch taped next Generation episode
5:00 – find paper with group story I started writing; wait for inspiration
6:00 – 7:00 – have supper, tell mom about homework, get help with it
7:00 – 9:30 – watch TV
9:30 – do homework, go to bed
Research Winona Ryder
note: put gym stuff in bag
put chocolate bar in fridge, eat it while watching TV
be depressed…

                                                  I wrote all that while at school and stuck the loose leaf into my diary when I got home. It’s interesting to see that my obsession with planning my life and tracking my time began early. I recently wrote a blog post about my tracking obsession, which I believed was a new passion but I guess I’ve always been this way. I’m rather amused to see that watching the Joan Rivers show was such a priority, and I have no idea why I felt the need to research Winona Ryder, nor how I intended to do so before the advent of the internet. I also got a good chuckle out of the last line: “be depressed”. Even then I had a sense of humour about my melancholy proclivities. 

                                             And then I go on and on about my “love” for my celebrity crush. Hilariously though, I conclude with this:

If, when I’m older, I read this and it seems stupid and like a dumb crush (supposing I’m over him), I’m sorry but I really do love him. If I still love him, please excuse my saving anything so realistic.

                                         So amused by my teenaged “love”, and yet surprising self-awareness about how ridiculous it was.

God I’m depressed. If I can’t have what I really want (job wise) like in my fantasies then I want to illustrate books, and write them eventually. I would really like to write Ranmadia. Please, Nic, write it over the summer, it must be done before we forget the story.

                                        Oh, this is sad. I don’t know what I was referring to with the job that I really wanted, but even my backup plan of illustrating and writing books did not come to pass. And no, I never did write Ranmadia. It was a story my brother and I had come up with together. He narrated the story, and I responded with what the protagonist did. My brother was already GMing table-top role-playing games with his friends by this point so that’s basically what this story was, an RPG without the dice. I felt like it was such a good story, and I was so desperate to get it down on paper, and yet I never did. And now I don’t remember it at all.

Sigh, sigh, sigh, sigh, sigh
To do over long weekend:
Watch Beauty and the Beast
Watch taped episodes of Young Indy
Do all homework (yeah right) no really
Paint Ranmadia thing
Draw those pictures from magazines
I hate my life and self

                                     Geez, kid, you’re such a downer!

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