Dear Diary

A prologue.

While I was home over this most recent vacation, my brother and I did some serious cleaning. A little over two years ago we sold our mother’s house and while we brought some things to our dad’s house in Maine, a lot of furniture and other random crap we stowed away in a massive storage unit. Since then we’ve tried to slowly go through all that crap (besides the nice furniture and artwork, which is in some sort of climate-controlled room somewhere. Actually I envision this stuff in some bank vault where you have to wear a hazmat suit to get in or something. Clearly I’ve never been to this storage unit so let’s hope that antique Grandfather clock is still telling time). We didn’t make our first major dent until this most recent trip, when we successfully decreased our storage space of crap by almost more than half.

(Now, before you stop reading because you are thinking this is just going to be really fucking boring, hold tight because this is coming to a point soon).

As you can imagine we went through a lot of stuff from our childhood. This included various toys, games, strange artwork, and between the two of us, a lot of Star Wars memorabilia (don’t worry, we held onto the Ewok village). I did have a big grown-up moment when I ceremoniously trashed the bulk of my X-Files collection (aka every magazine cover that ever showed a picture of David Duchovny or Gillan Anderson, as well as a lot of well-used VHS tapes). That was a good thing.

However, the highlight of this long and torturous process was finding my oldest existing diary. It’s a diary I received in fourth grade, wrote in sporadically, and continued writing in through my sophomore year of college. Yes, this diary spans 10 years (1993-2003) and it is fucking hilarious.



Yes that's both an Adidas Samba sneaker and an ode to Titanic.

I spent some time reading passages to various friends and family after this fantastic discovery and we all agreed on a few points:

(1) I was a weird kid.
(2) My obsession with The X-Files was unhealthy.
(3) I may have had an undiagnosed case of ADD all these years.
(4) I may not have changed much since age 11, because my diary has an odd resemblance to my blog.
(5) I was pretty into religion at a young age.
(6) I was kind of slutty as a young girl.

I realize those last two seem contrary, but in between entries talking about hooking up with guys (and there’s a hilarious passage from eighth grade where I vastly misinterpret third base), there’s an inserted letter “to God, from Annie.” Oh and when going through a box of pottery my dad started to pull out some stuff I made in third grade. Holding a strange blob up my Jewish father looked to me and asked,

“What’s this?”

I glanced at the object in his hand.

“Oh, that’s the Baby Jesus.”

Because in third grade I created the entire nativity scene in a pottery class.

So get excited because over the next few weeks you can look forward to reliving my childhood with me, as I post entries from my angst-filled journal.

To kick things off, I wanted to give you a peek at my chosen diary décor (did I mention it's a Lisa Frank journal? But of course it is), and my shoddy 11-year-old handwriting (if you look closely you'll see that in 1993 I both longed for a boyfriend, was not the best or the worst soccer player, and had a strong desire to know all the songs to the movie Newises).



Kittens and a neon sneaker? Why not.



Thank goodness my handwriting has improved since then. I still don't know all the words to the songs in Newsies, however. I'm working on it.

Prepare yourselves for a rollicking good time once this thing really gets going....