I Chose The Right Friends

I Hope He Hates Her

As Long As I am Alive

The actions of every girl everywhere could be explained by "she's just jealous."  So like.... "Carly is allergic to cheese" WELL SHE'S JUST JEALOUS.

I never did read The Witch of Blackbird Pond.

I Guess I'll B Seein Ya

This is the final entry in my 6th grade diary.

Jane Doe was my older brother's girlfriend.  I always had girlcrushes on his girlfriends.  I told myself it was because they were like the older sister I never had, but seeing it in the light of day, out of the darkness of the closet (!), they were also plain old crushes.  I REALLY wanted these girls to like me.

Often times I'd make proclamations that I knew weren't true but I wanted to be, like here I pretend to be done with caring what other people think about me.  I'm not sure where I thought I'd "B seein" my journal around .. at school?  in town?  I was probably just trying to sound grown up by stealing break up language I'd heard on TV.  It's not you journal, it's me.  Don't be sad, even though I'm "done with you," I'll love you always... notice there is no exclamation point after that last "Bye."  That makes it extra serious and poignant.

Bye! 

I Like Thrift Shops. Oh Well.

Here's the thing - as a pre-teen I would have done anything to look more like a woman (i.e. not scrawny).  Succeeding at being sexy meant boobs and filling out, neither of which happened for me until I left for college at 18.  

In junior high, the perceived popular girls were going through puberty while I was all bones and angles and stringy hair.  And bad taste, apparently. 

I remember I bought a size Medium sweater once and was so excited because it wasn't an X-Small.  And while I understood that being skinny was a fashionable ideal, from a sexual attraction standpoint it felt useless.  Boys didn't ask me out.  I only had a vague sense of superiority from it since I wasn't trying for it, and it wasn't until I crossed over to the dark side that I understood skinny girls were idealized for their self control.

The punch line here is obvious, but I'll spell it out anyway.  For so long all I wanted, more than anything in the world, was to look like a woman, and then when I finally did, all I wanted was to be a skinny little girl again.  And that's what it is for women, and it's shitty beyond shitty.  When we're girls we want to look older so we feel important and desired, then there are a couple years of being young and sexually attractive, but that's fraught with all its own issues, and then we start the awful march towards adulthood which we're taught to fight with all our might because we're only desirable when we're young.

In high-school, one of my teachers asked us if we would rather be a man or a woman.  I responded emphatically that I prefer to be a woman because we can give birth, and that trumps anything a man could do, period.  My friend said she would much rather be a man because "there's so much less to deal with and worry about."  Though I saw her point, I didn't agree at the time.  Ten years later, I'd reconsider. 

The Tyranny of the Tiny Tee

This is the sister entry to my Boobifesto.

So! Much! Righteous! Indignation!

post script - I covet that floral bustier hiding under the Brady Bunch knock off and Mom jeans.  

Everything in Montreal Costs Less in 1995

What does it mean that the only big city I was excited about was in Canada?

The line about ordering Burke's next meal had to do with a punishment my mom devised.  The rule went, if a family member was being mean or annoying or whatever, and you asked them politely to stop and they didn't, then you got to order their next meal.  She felt it was a good way to wrench control from the person who had it in a way that was satisfying for the person who didn't.  I was clearly pretty excited about it as evidenced by my * and smiley face. 

Also, I <3 you, journal!  Thanks for being such a good journal on The Great American Road Trip!  Well, C YA!  BUH - BYE!!  

Love,
Anni

So Smooth and Beautiful

In this installment of my summer of '95 travel journal - Lucas says I act fake, I shut my dad's head in the door of the van, I saw where Cirque du Soleil lives, and I love French.

In what universe is Dartmouth "sorta big"?  Whatever, iz "pretty cool" (said in Miley Cyrus voice).

Further Travels Along the Eastern Seaboard aka "I want a boyfriend! Soooo badly!"

Oh look, my habit of mindlessly repeating whatever adults said is at it again!  This time, Martha's Vineyard is "overrated" and our Cape Cod B&B is "darling." 

I also slip in some SMES 6th grade slang - "coinkidink."  Yeah.. I.. don't ask.

"G.H." above is the Get Him System I had my eye on.  But "if mom found out, she'd B mad!" 

My dad used to pay us in cash when we got good grades on our report cards (it was his view that school was our "job" and we should be paid according to our job performance).  This was fine with me, because then I could afford a book that would tell me how to get a man.

Good job whoever was mayor of Boston in 1995, your city was clean enough to earn the descriptor "not as bad as NY or Philly.  Not 2 many homeless, no gay pride week, no yicky stripper clubs!"  Gosh, strippers are just so yicky, you know?  

At least I had my prized Pocahontas CD to soothe my scarred virgin soul.  Oh and apparently in Plymouth, Massachusetts, I "saw rock."

The One Where I Call Gay People Gross

Before shit gets real, let's take a moment to notice that I saved the business card of the kennel where we boarded our bichon frize, Fritz, in NY.  

Translated with spelling corrections:


Dear Journal,
today we spent the entire day in New York... Aaarrhhh!  I got so scared.  There were at least 20 sleazy nude bars.  Not to mention it was Gay Pride Week!  I saw guys kissing guys and girls with collars and leashes to another girl.  I saw guys with Keropi boxes!  Gross.  We took cabs, dirty, filthy, cabs.  I heard yelling of prejudice remarks & I saw a fight.  I was clinging to dad.  You know I actually walked the streets at 10:30 at night!  I was so scared.  We stayed again at the Hilton, same one.  I miss people, as always, C ya!  Buh-Bye! <3, Anni
 

"We Went Down This Sleezy Street"

Anything outside my little comfort bubble growing up got a dramatic negative label.  Plastic surgery is GROSS.  Sex before marriage is IMMORAL.  Ross Perot is PARANOID.  Britney Spears is a SLUT.  Usually I just needed to hear an adult say it once (like the Ross Perot thing) and I'd parrot it until somebody challenged me.  This prevented me from having to think and form opinions for myself.

So it's with a cringe that I present the next few entries, detailing my first visit to Philadelphia.  I was predictably prissy and sheltered about the whole experience, complaining about how "creepy" and "unsafe" it was, and then how I didn't like some restaurant because "there chicken was like rubber and the atmosphere was weird."  

Sometimes I really dislike the little person I was.

   
But this isn't even the worst of it.  Stay tuned for next time, when you'll hear my thoughts on the Gay Pride Parade in NYC...

Wellslian

That's how I spelled Wesleyan when I was 11, when my older brother toured it.  Since I was the last kid to look at colleges, I'd had 2 previous college road trips under my belt and thought I knew what I wanted.  I really liked Denison when we looked with Burke and was in love with Davidson when I went with Lucas.  When it came time for my own grand college tour, I wanted to go to Dartmouth and Williams.  They both denied me, Williams addressing my rejection letter simply "Dear Nagy,"

Burke ended up going to Haverford.  Pogs were cool at the time.

The breakdown for the Nagy kids was as follows - Burke was the brilliant one, Lucas was the quirky one, I was the dramatic one.  This worked out okay until I turned un-cute around puberty.  Burke was so smart and tutored me through middle school and freshamn year until he had to leave for college.  I credit him with me passing algebra and physics, he wasn't just smart but a really good teacher, but I'm getting off track.  The point is, for some bizarro reason, Burke didn't get in to Wesleyan and I did.  I'm guessing this is because Wes had gotten a reuputation as a school that catered to ugly hippies, and i was a blond white girl from south orange county, which for them counted as diversity.  I got the rejection letter from Dartmouth and the acceptance letter from Wesleyan on the same day, which I decided was a sign.

I was depressed and hated OC, and so pictured myself living it up at Wesleyan, attending political rallies and falling in love with a skinny poet from Vermont.  It didn't work out that way.  But Wes served it's purpose.  I didn't know it was possible to feel nostalgic for depression, but it is.

Missouri, Illinos, India

The summer before we each were seniors in highschool, my parents took my brothers and me on a huge cross country road trip, stopping and touring all the colleges we had even a fleck of interest in.  The summer after 6th grade, June of 1995, was our maiden voyage; oldest bro Burke was to be a 12th grader the next year so the entire family hit the road in our blue Chevy Astro van.

My mom called it "The Great American Road Trip," which shortened to GART.  The main thing I remember was being obsessed with the Pocahontas soundtrack (of "Paint With All the Colors of the Wind" fame) at the time and listening to it non-stop on my little walkman.  To get a better sense of just how uncool this was, my best friends were listening to Aaliyah and Ace of Base that summer, and my other favorite CD was the Cirque du Soleil "Alegria" soundtrack (for years I nurtured fantasies of being one of those sexy singing clowns.) 

I kept a journal of the whole trip.  It's not quite as dramatic as my dispatches from the school year, but there are some fun tidbits.  Like on the scrapbook page above the Mr. J's Coffee Shop business card, you'll see I saved a piece of my sunburn peel from our end of school trip to Wild Rivers.  On double stick tape.  I PICKED OFF MY DEAD SKIN AND SAVED IT IN MY JOURNAL ON DOUBLE STICK TAPE.  And then I labeled it using one of those pens where you wrote an invisible message and "decode" it with another marker.  I think I bought it at Sanrio.

My heart aches a bit reading about how I wanted to meet "someone at camp that is nice & sweet & good looking."  What really happened at camp that summer was my that my cabin-mates cornered me and accused me of looking at their boobs.  I was 11.  Did I mention it was Christian camp?

Oh Well!  Bu-Bye!  <3, Anni

Sweet Consumption

soooo, HIGH SCHOOL.  All the drama gets magnified and then seasoned with a heavy dose trying-to-sound-deep.  Which leads to journal entries like these, where I write, in all seriousness, "human conciesness (sic) isn't a deep enough medium for self-actualization."  fuck me gently with a chainsaw ya'll. 

Framed Today At School

A had a (bad?) habit as a kid of taking words I'd heard adults say but didn't know the meaning of and then using them, wrongly.  Especially words that sounded important, I'd co-opt for my own dramatic purposes.  This blog gets its name from a classic example - I'd heard the word SIN in church a lot and thus proclaimed that "Sin is Great."

In this entry from 3rd grade, we see I'd recently been exposed to the word "framed," which I sensed was something bad but otherwise didn't understand.  You can actually see I was self conscious about not knowing the meaning since I first wrote down "Dear Diary, I was framed today at school."  But then I vigorously erased that and wrote instead "I think I was framed today at school."

In other news, _____________ is so cute, nice, sexy, gets good grades.

Too Hot Shotty

I'm Back! aka Sooo Much To Say! Part II

The "Oh well if it is, that is how I feel" line was my personal version of "no offense or anything."  Which I think translates too "I'm going to be a bitch right now but don't want to cop to it." 

Previously: Sooo Much To Say! Part I

The Get Him System

It was the summer before 7th grade, and I wanted this SO badly.

Shes Just Jelous

Translated (with spelling corrections):

Leftover from previous page – “I hate patterned underwear but my….

…. favorite kind of underwear is Hanes Her Way.  I always like to play keep-away with the boys during recess.  I have ugly buck teeth.  I am wearing perfume to the Christmas pageant.  __________ is a reader.  All the boys like ________________.  ________________ calls her a lot and wants to go in to the corner and kiss her.  Even make out with her.  But _____________ likes (boy 1), (boy 2), and (boy 3).  _______________ is jealous ____________’s singing voice she says it sucks but she’s just jealous <3.  I still have and sleep with a teddy bear.  I will have to talk to ______________ about what she said to ___________ it was mean.  I hate challenge.  I can’t wait for Christmas.  _____________’s dad is strict but funny.  I used to think I read well until _______________ said she read the Witch of Blackbird Pond.  Oh well I really don’t care as long as I am alive.  <3

Wains World, Disny Land

Say Hello To Your Friends!

Before there was V.C. Andrews, there was Anne M. Martin and Francine Pascal.

Lately I've been hunting for old copies of these books, mostly because I think the new covers are total crap and I don't want my future daughter(s) subjected to them.  Furthermore, I was disgusted to find out that Sweet Valley High has changed the description of Jessica and Elizabeth from "a perfect size 6" to "a perfect size 4."

So fucked up.

Anyway, last week I picked up a BSC Super-Special - "Baby-sitter's Club at Shadow Lake," the byline of which is "Campfires, ghost stories - summer vacations are the best!" I couldn't agree more, ladies.  And at the back of this excellent volume from Scholastic Inc. are two pages that fill me with nostalgic glee, which I want to share with all 7 of my loyal blog readers:

OMG SFAR??!!!  (that last part stands for So Fucking Awesome, Right?  I just made it up).  Plan on it!

Unfortunately I don't have a certified Locket Charm Bracelet or Portable Cassette Player to give away to the knower of all BSC trivia, however I do have a $25 Amazon.com gift card, with which you could probably buy both those things as well as BSC Super Special #9 - "Starring the Baby-sitters Club."  aka Jessi Ramsey is Better Than You.

Entries must be postmarked by November 30th, 1992.