Thirteen diary quotes

My boy will be a teenager in one year. Guess I had better re-familiarize myself with adolescent angst . . . and how better to do accomplish that, than to pilfer my old diaries for quotes?

To be honest, this struck me as a horrible idea when I first thought of it. I was a depressed, nihilistic kid, and I tend to absorb that mood if I spend too much time futzing with the old diaries. Nevertheless, the first quote I found was so wonderful, it encouraged me to continue.

1. July 10, 1977. I’m 15 and bummed because a recent “social” with my Jewish youth group (BBYO, to my fellow lantsmen) did not meet up to my expectations.

How far have I come in the past fifteen plus years? Ever since I was a child I had an attraction to girls, and I am no closer now than I was twelve years ago.

Beating myself up for not scoring at age three. That’s, um, special.

2. August 1, 1977. Thanks to my appetite for Carlos Castaneda’s books, I was always trying to mess with my dreams. All I ever managed to do was give myself nightmares.

I woke up with a scream which was half horror and half disgust. By the light outside I would say it was about 5:00. I was kind of sorry that I hadn’t woken anybody up. It’s quite a novelty to wake up screaming, and I was pissed that nobody had heard it but me. I am a self-piteous bastard, you know.

3. September 7, 1977. I had spent the day helping out at the high school’s pre-term registration. The entry goes on for several pages and is unusually upbeat (for me). Summer had been a disappointment, but now I was back with friends. Plus, I got to see J., the girl who would become gf v1.0, and I could almost convince myself that she felt the same way towards me as I felt towards her.

I ran into my English teacher, Mrs. C., who asked me what I’d thought of The Sun Also Rises (a summer reading assignment, I suppose).

“How’d you like it?”

“I don’t know. It just didn’t move me. I couldn’t relate, I guess. Especially with the bullfights, I just couldn’t relate to Hemingway’s love of them.”

I remember that, almost a year ago, I had said much the same thing to S [the woman who would be my Senior AP English teacher]. She had replied, “Well, I don’t mean to patronize you, but some of the stuff he writes you won’t understand until you’re older, in your twenties, and disillusioned with your life.”

(1) I had been disillusioned with my life since age 3 (see above); (2) Older? My twenties? My mind is boggling; and (3) I still think Hemingway is a putz, although nowadays I think The Sun Also Rises is good for a laugh.

4. September 7, 1977. One other thing. J. (gf v1.0) later married my friend S. It’s odd how the three of us are so intertwined in these diary entries — not just once or twice, but several times. I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised, since we were part of the same small crowd. But still. Odd.

“Can you trust S.?” I asked J.

“Sure. He’s Jewish, you know.”

I wonder, does she know I’m Jewish?
I don’t think so.

5. September 12, 1977. Leave it to me to complicate first love.

I should be happy but the truth is, I’m not. Love is not a happy emotion.

6. January 11, 1981. Yeah, that’s enough of That Seventies Show. I stopped writing in my diary in June of ’78, when things were still going good with J., but I was already tearing myself up over what would happen at the end of high school. Flash forward to January, 1982. J. and I had just broken up. I’m back in the dorms, trying to be a New and Better Person, and it ain’t going over too well. R. and V. are fellow dormies.

My attempts at changing got a response, a first response I should say, from R., who got pissed off at me, accused me of turning into an airhead. That I was kissing up to V. Maybe true. I was agitated though and since he wanted me to get back to my old self ragging on people I told him he used unconventionality as a crutch for a personality.

Zing. R. wanted me to rag on people, and I ragged but good.

7. January 11, 1981. More from that entry:

John M. said, “So how did it work out with your girlfriend over vacation?” I said, “She broke up with me.” R. said, “Oh, tell it like it is, she dumped on you,” so I said, “She dumped on me. For a guy twice my height. And twice my age.”

So John said, “Well, I hope you at least kicked him in the knee.”

8. November 1, 1981. Doh! Someone really needs to slap this twenty-year-old guy and tell him to become part of the Silicon Valley Explosion.

The newest thing is med school. I guess I’m getting to where these decisions really do matter — What I mean is, my choice of college, for instance, wasn’t too vital; it affected me & J. but as far as my whole future was concerned I could just as easily have gone to any other UC, or Michigan, for that matter. I’m getting to where six months is a fairly important unit of time. But this choice of med school vs. grad school — this really carries with it a lifetime of repercussions. And when I think of it in those terms, I realize that medical school might just be the best thing to do.

Still a little over a year before I hooked up with Karen. I don’t know how I lived with myself.

9. December 20, 1981. I wrote fiction back then, too. And if you think it’s painful for me to read through old diary entries, you have no idea what it’s like looking at my old unfinished stories. Dreck!

“Sisters of the Paradigm” (I’m pretty sure I’m going to rename it — maybe “The Sculptor”) is much better developed in my head but I still only have 23 typed pages.

That title. It burns. Please, God, tell me all those pages have turned to dust.

10. August 25, 1982. Christmas, 1981, I sent J. a holiday card, and we had had an infrequent and stiff correspondence ever since. In August, I came home for a few days and decided to see her again. I don’t think I had the slightest clue what I wanted from a meeting like this — surely not to get back together, since I was still too snake-bit to entertain such a thought. Maybe I wanted to see her again with an outcome less disastrous than our last face-to-face. Or, in my own words,

Basically, I wanted to see her again and not act like an asshole.

It didn’t work.

11. January 29, 1983. I met Karen in September, 1982, when my pal Stan introduced us in the Chemistry Library. Up until the January 29 entry, there are only scattered mentions of Karen. I suspect I was feeling superstitious and didn’t want to jinx anything. By January 29, things had progressed to the point that I felt it safe to play catch-up. Here, I’m writing about my reaction to Karen at Stan’s dinner party.

Technically Stan was presenting Karen and Suzie [Karen’s roommate] to me. But I told him that it was Karen I wanted, was impressed with — a vague feeling — which I feebly expressed at the time by saying something trite like “We’re on the same wavelength.” That was/is the feeling though.

I called Stan the next day and asked him, had she fallen in love with me yet? I was being horribly sappy. Why, I asked him, why doesn’t it happen easily?

In retrospect, getting her to fall in love with me wasn’t that tough. Finding her, that was the tough part.

12. February 2, 1983. Eventually, we did more than kiss.

Time dragged to around 9, 9:30 and I forced Karen up to her room so that we could study.

When we got there, she put an album on — Ravel’s “Bolero,” which is supposed to have all the sexual connotation — “I couldn’t resist,” she said — but the really funny thing was, it reminded both of us of “Allegro non Troppo,” and not “10.” Good God my writing today sucks. My brain is chocolate pudding and it’s all Karen’s fault.

13. August 25, 1982. Fuck chronological order. Back to my weird evening with J.

She said, “You know what I think. I think you’re going to get another girlfriend eventually and then forget all about me. And then we’ll be able to be friends.” That made sense.

And she was right, too.

If you’ve slogged through all of this self-indulgence with me, thank you. Next week we’ll have a Cosmo Thirteen, I promise. I think I had to get this out of my system first.

Leave a comment & you know what you’ll get . . . some nasty linky STD, no doubt.

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Go give Shaina some love. She had a rough week, too.

D.