Diary Friday

I decided to go back to the devastatingly embarrassing high school years for this entry … flipped through the pages of my sophomore year diary … reading all of the tortured ecstatic prose … every page flickering with endless exclamation points.

Suddenly came upon this relatively simple entry … which describes a memory from 4th grade I had, up until this very moment, completely forgotten. It STILL tickles my funny bone, after all these years.

So here is the latest installment of Diary Friday.

January 23, 1983

Today has been really quiet. I went to church and Sunday school, and I sat with Glenda V. in church. I had forgotten how funny she was!

I remember in 4th grade, Dee Dee wanted to get together a rock group – she wanted to call it The Shooting Stars – and we had one rehearsal at Erica’s house, in which we sang for about 5 minutes, got into fights, and broke the closet door so that Carolyn got trapped.

Anyway, the whole thing was so ridiculous. We all sat on Erica’s bed, trying to sing these 60s hippie songs, from one book that Dee Dee had.

O.K. Now Dee Dee had this old battered guitar that was so out of tune it wasn’t even funny, and Dee Dee’s voice was this weepy off-tune thing. And she looked like a hippy with her long disheveled frizzy hair, and jeans jumpsuit, and just watching her strum dreamily along on this twangy guitary and singing a ballad, shakily, swaying, her eyes closed – it was just hysterical.

And Glenda and I have always had a problem with going into hopeless hysterics at crucially serious moments.

So anyway, just watching Dee Dee was enough, but Glenda leaned over to me, during the singing, and murmured, “I’m going to stuff a handkerchief in my mouth so I won’t laugh out loud.”

Well, this obviously made things worse.

Whenever Dee Dee opened her mouth to sing, Glenda would calmly and matter-of-factly open her mouth wide and stuff the handkerchief all the way in. And that would send me absolutely rolling off the bed.

So The Shooting Stars obviously didn’t get very far.

Glenda is so funny. I taped the mass today for people in nursing homes, who can’t go, and I walked home, blasting Devo as I went.

Today is really wet and windy and the snow keeps sliding off the roof. And the road had steam rising off of it.

Glenda told me to come to the Prout mixer that was open to all schools, so that a bunch of girls wouldn’t be standing around dancing with each other, and I want to go.

I mean, who knows? Some kid from another school may ask me to dance. I know now that I have no chance (Ed: The word “no” is literally underlined twenty times. No exaggeration.) for romance at my school. I don’t know what it is, but no one looks at me. And I know I’m not grotesque. I don’t know what it is. I am not grossly unpopular. All the popular kids like me, but I am not in with them. I guess I’ll just have to wait until I get out of this fuckin school. My school is really bad with peer pressure.

But maybe some other guy from other school would stoop to dance with me, because he won’t know about how it is for me at my school.

I really shouldn’t put myself down this way. Because I know I’m nicer than the popular kids, but it’s hard to be confident when all these cheerleaders are surrounding you, trading boyfriends, while I stand meekly by with a head full of dreams and not even one kiss to my name.