But does he like-like her?

Last night, I headed to Freddy’s Bar in Brooklyn for their “Cringe Night” - an open mic event where people expose their embarrassing adolescence by reading out loud from their teenage diaries. To my dismay, Cringe Night was canceled and will not resume until next month. However, the concept inspired me to review (and share) some of my own journals.

I’ve been scribbling my heart and soul into the pages of my journals almost weekly since age 7 (before blogs were invented)! I have 19 in total (so far) and I’ve always enjoyed reading through my old, almost illegible and grossly misspelled entries (my penmanship has improved, my spelling – not so much) to see how much I’ve changed, and stayed the same, over the years. The pages I read last night from 7th grade paint a painfully true picture of what it’s like to be thirteen, or, in the case of this particular entry, almost thirteen. Spelling and grammar has been corrected here, but no words (or names) have been changed:

Wednesday, February 8th, 1990, 12-years-old (almost 13)
Today in PE we got tested on these gymnastic routines we’ve been working on. There’s this new girl named Amber who came to school a few weeks ago. She’s very pretty, outgoing and good at everything. I knew the minute I saw her that she would be popular.

Anyhow, of course she’s in my PE class and so is this boy, Ben, that I kind of like. I know Ben thinks Amber’s cute, but I don’t really know if he likes her or not. So in PE, I got an 81, which is okay. And of course Amber gets a 96 (best in the class). So annoying.

I’m going to find out if I got into “Oliver!” today. If I don’t, I’ll be depressed for the rest of my life.

Incidentally, I did NOT make it into “Oliver!” And it has, in fact, plagued me with life-long depression as predicted. Why God? Why oh why did I not get cast as a workhouse orphan?!?