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