my so-called life

in the process of decluttering before prince antonio arrives (bene daye's name for her brother...and nothing close to his real name), i have uncovered all of my old journals. mostly, ones from middle and high school; the ones fraught with teenage angst, bitterness and confusion. boy, i thought my world was ending in some of those entries. and over what? well...

1. the fact that jon erik, the hottest, dreamiest and most-coveted boy in high
school (and a senior), wouldn't give me (a freshman) the time of day
2. or that i couldn't get my nose pierced at 14?
3. or that my parents wouldn't let me go see pearl jam two states away...at 15
years old...with other 15 and 16 year olds.
4. or that i was never asked to ANY dance in middle or high school.
5. or that katie and mandy had it out for me for their own ridiculous reasons and
made 7th grade a nightmare.
6. or that i went to a salon to get a "body wave" like alyssa milano and came out
looking like bernadette peters.
7. or that donnie whalberg from NKOTB never wrote me back after i sent him a care
package and i cried for weeks. i just KNEW i would be the one fan he would fall
in love with and see that i loved him for him and not because he was famous.
8. or in highschool when kurt cobain and jerry garcia died and i skipped school with
my friends to "remember" them.
9. or when andrea, nishah, tiffani and i stuffed our sleeping bags, snuck out of her
parents house, met up with some neighborhood boys and went swimming at 3 o'clock
in the morning. but we got caught by her big, scary mom who then called our
parents to come pick us up and get us the $@*# out of her house.
10. or the night i accidentally burned my friends car down to a black frame because
i was irresponsible with a cigarette...okay, when my parents got the phonecall
about this one, my life really was in danger! I BURNED A CAR UP!!! not to
mention andrea's parents, who asked me to replace the car.

it's amazing to me that now i can laugh at every one of these seemingly life-ending moments...with the exception of #9 and #10. they could have been much worse and i would kill my daughter if she snuck out to go swimming with random boys at 3am! demetrius is bewildered by the fact that teenage girls journal as much as they do and that they want to remember everything, good and bad...and then hold onto the journals for twenty years! teenage girls tend to be overly dramatic and i guess it just seems that, at that moment, life as they know it is OVER. i mean, before you're an adult with true grown-up problems, the most catastrophic event in your life may just be that a certain boy doesn't like you or that you can't get your nose pierced and go to a pearl jam concert. though i am incredibly thankful that my life doesn't contain that much drama these days, it's amusing to read my own stories of sweet valley high.