Class of Nineteen-Ninety Seven- (teen year old dork gets deep)

While vacationing in the very bedroom that I grew up in, I was (of course) drawn to old diaries, photo albums, and things from my youth and adolescence that I collected and saved in boxes. I was mostly eager to search through old yearbooks that I hadn't flipped through in ages, but for some reason, it just didn't provide me with the cheap entertainment that I thought it would. Blah-blah, I could only imagine what people were really up to...

It was my journal entries that really had me staying up late. For the most part, the writing was goofy, mainly because I started keeping a journal in 1991 (which I think means I was in the sixth grade). Once I got to the high school entries, I read about things that I'd completely forgotten about. Like the boy I liked so much my sophomore year missed three weeks of school, and somewhere in there he had a spinal tap, which concerned me a lot. He had a girlfriend, and I can't even remember who she must have been, but that I thought we flirted so much she couldn't have been that serious. Then, during my junior year, he hadn't even remembered how he knew me, which classes we'd shared our sophomore year, and because of that I swore to my journal that I hated him, but still secretly liked him (and that was completely acceptable). (It was years later that I found out he was always baked, that he dealt drugs, and that he was a complete weasel. Me naive? No way).

Rereading everything was semi-frightening, only because I'd forgotten so much. I have mixed feelings about high school in general...I remember feeling so far ahead of it -so dangerously cynical!- but most of my memories are bittersweet in that teen-angst kind of way. I was definitely not a rebel, but I followed rules knowing that if I did so, I could break them less obviously. I'm wondering if all good girls felt that way? Still do?

Though my journal entries were never tremendously long - a page at best - I remember how empowering it was to write in them, silly as they were. I actually felt like my journal was this secret girl that was way cooler than me, but that she really cared for the dumb things I wrote about and looked forward to reading them. Ah-ha-ha! So I was cheesy and pathetic...so what!!? Visiting all of that again was tremendous; no time-machine necessary.