Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
An invasion of sorts
No telling how a teenage girl’s diary ended up at the bottom of our trash can. When I tossed out the morning’s garbage I saw it there, opened to a blank page. At first, I thought it was one of my many writing notebooks (you know, you get an idea for a new story, you have to write it down, but you don’t want it to rub shoulders with all those older crappy ideas that never went anywhere; THIS idea will be different, THIS story is going to go somewhere, so it damn well deserves its own notebook!) so I fished it out and looked at it.
Nope. Not mine.
It belongs, belonged, to a girl who was a high school freshman in 2008. There are no entries later than October 28, 2008, which makes me wonder if she came to a bad end. Perhaps her mother or father, cleaning house, came across the diary and could not bear to have it around (but why throw it into someone else’s trash can?) I’ve already googled her name hoping not to find news reports of some grizzly murder or car accident. She’s clean on Google. So the question remains: why?
It’s a multipart diary with sections devoted to prayers, goals, “trials and triumphs,” etc. The cover design is of a rather Duggary-looking girl in a pink dress that’s up to her chin, looking sweet enough to put ten diabetics into ketoacidosis.
Do I have any responsibility to honor the privacy of a stranger whose diary ended up in my trash? My compromise: I decided to read it but not reveal anything too terribly embarrassing on the blog. Nor would I reveal any identifying information.
With those ground rules in place, here’s what I’ve learned of our diarist:
She’s a thoroughly indoctrinated Christian, praying that this kid or that family be saved. She prays for that sort of thing a lot. (I wonder how many people have prayed for my salvation? At least one that I can think of, back at the Crescent City hospital. *Shudder*)
She’s a young Republican. On the back page is the draft of a letter she wrote to “Mr.” McCain.
She’s trying very hard to be a better person. Seems like her heart is in the right place.
She writes the usual angsty adolescent song lyrics and poetry.
She doesn’t have very lofty goals — “Be the person you meant me to be,” which I presume is addressed to Jesus.
By far, the most detailed section of the diary is “Prayers.” It’s remarkable how pushy some folks can be in their prayers. Not only does our diarist wish for the salvation of others, but she wants one woman to “stop dating and be worthy of a good man,” and she wants all the children to be taken out of one home and for their parents to be saved. Presumably, the kids would be allowed back into their home at that point, but she forgot to pray for that.
She’s not the sort of person I would have talked to in high school (although, oddly enough, one very like her friended me on Facebook). But there’s such a desperate earnestness in her writing and such modesty in her own personal prayers that she strikes me as a genuinely good person, and I can’t help but hope she’s okay. It worries me, though, that the diary ended up in the bottom of my trash bin.
Why?
D.
How bizarre. Kind of interesting to speculate how it ended up in your trashcan, and I wonder if she lives in the neighborhood?
Maybe she realized just how indoctinrated she was, and decided to divorce herself from it. Hence tossing the old diary.
cue music. . . but what kind? sappy Lifetime channel music? twilight zone? murder mystery theme?
How did it end up in your hands? That’s more interesting than its existence. You were obviously meant to find it.
This was the “out” diary. The one she left out and she wanted her parents to see so they felt their teen was ok and they could thank God for their good luck in having a good girl. How much you want to bet, she’s got another diary secretly stashed that tells all the real inner drama. You get a hold of that and you’re in for a treat.
Sounds like the opening scene of a tv crime show. One of my daughter’s spurned suitors once tossed many of his possessions including shoes, clothes, wallet, books, etc. on our front lawn. We never really got an explanation. She may be trying to get somebody’s attention.
Lyvvie’s theory leads the pack, IMHO!
Maybe they’d moved away a year ago and she’d forgotten the journal, and the folks who live there now (or the land lords) found it and tossed it. Heck, they might have had it for a while and just got around to getting rid of it.
It could been dropped in your trash because it was convenient location at the time (walking along, maybe reading it or found it laying about and your can happened to be handy), a mistaken garbage can usage (neighbor accessing your can accidentally or on purpose) or maybe your garbage guys knocked it in your can without realizing it (or caring) when they last dumped your can.
Something could have happened in her life, anything good, bad or indifferent (accident, death, family break up, lottery win, the Twilight books, moving to Canada since Obama won the election, boys, kissing, the return of NKOTB, getting involved in high school, a nosey little brother…) just some change in her life that simply caused her to set it aside.
Who knows? It’s fun to speculate.
For me, though, I find it refreshing to see you look at an ‘indoctrinated christian’ as a person you’re concerned about and consider to be a ‘genuinely good person’, instead of simply a ‘wingnut’, ‘neocon’, or ‘the enemy’.
People are people, regardless of whom they vote for or what they list under ‘religion’ on a survey form. I’m probably the most conservative person to comment with any regularity on your blog (and as a centrist I’m FAR from what I’d consider ‘conservative’) and I’m surely traipsing a bit more in the religious direction than most folks here, although I’d never, ever call myself religious. We’re still friends, even though we sometimes disagree. It’s OKAY to disagree and have differing opinions. It’s also okay to believe in God or not, pray or not, wear ‘Duggar dresses’ or have green spiky hair. It’s okay to be gay or straight, militaristic or a peacenik, prefer country-western music or Mozart, watch birds or Nascar, prefer cats or dogs, have tons of kids or none, coffee or tea, vanilla or chocolate, Coke or Pepsi, innie or outie… and all of the multitudes of tints, tones and shades in between.
People are PEOPLE. It’s not surprising to me at all that a very religious, conservative teenage girl was – gasp! – a typical teenage girl with all the angsty, wistful, hopeful, kind, confused crap that ALL teenage girls have.
Maybe this opened your eyes a little, Doug. I hope it did.
I worry a great deal for our country. We’re facing a massive, growing divide that could very well rival the era of race riots and war protests forty years ago. Back then, two opposing sides screaming at each other led to massacres of white college kids, black folks just trying to get through the day, and a couple hundred thousand of our young men (just for starters). What will to opposing sides screaming at each other lead to now?
Who knows? But it won’t be pretty. For anyone.
I really wish today’s opposing sides would take a step back, just one single step, and realize for a moment that everyone on the other side is a husband or daughter or wife or grandparent or uncle or son or teacher or welder or farmer or poet. A PERSON. No more, no less. And that they, too, are human.
As a people, we need to find a middle ground. A kindness. An understanding. Or at least an acceptance that a differing opinion and point of view can exist. As a people, we need to stop calling fellow Americans names – people we share a lot more in common with than whatever we’re disagreeing over. We need to stop playing dirty, feeding the propaganda machine, and losing all sense of reason. As a people we need to find solutions and try to meet each other half way, not just fling angry words and bullets and stones and legal actions in the hope we’ll score points for the pundits.
We’re sitting a hair’s breadth below 10% unemployment and it’s only gonna get worse. People are losing their homes and it’s only gonna get worse. The governments – Federal, State, and Local – are broke (have you read about stacks of people slowly rotting in Detroit hospital cellars because there’s no money to bury them?) and it’s only gonna get worse.
Winter’s coming, people are scared, and it’s gonna get a LOT worse of we can’t find some sort of common ground, and soon.
Maybe your discarded journal is a start.
Thanks, Tam. I thought you were having trouble writing? 🙂
But I’m sorry. I have to draw the line at outies.
I do think we’re going to see a return to race riots in this country, mostly because the folks who think a black president is intolerable are becoming more and more bold, and the rhetoric on television and talk radio is getting louder and nastier every week. Folks like me coming to terms with folks like the Duggars is all well and good, but it’s the potentially violent, assault weapon-packing racists/extremists we really need to worry about.
Fwiw, I see potentially violent, weapon packing extremists on both sides. And I talk to my conservative friends too about these exact same things.
Is there a race factor in this? Probably. But of all the conservative people I know – and I know a lot in real life up here in the cornfields – don’t care if Obama’s skin is black, white, green or speckled pink, he’s their president and they respect him and the office. They’re a LOT more upset over congress’s wild spending and lack of accountability. Out of the hundreds of people at the town meetings I was at, only ONE got upset and hateful about Obama himself, let alone his skin color. I really think the media is putting a much larger racist spin on this than there really is. Here, at least, the anger’s mostly directed at Congress (especially Pelosi who’s universally considered a fruit-loop on a power trip) and the consensus is that Obama’s pretty much a figurehead puppet, not really a factor. There’s a lot more pity and acceptance than venom, but ‘he’s a good man who’s in over his head’ that doesn’t make a good sound bite. Some screaming, foaming at the mouth racist plays a lot better on TV.
But I only know the people and life I know. Extremists come on both sides. Both sides worry me a great deal. And among every ultra conservative I’ve ever personally met – except one at a Town Hall meeting – race isn’t a consideration at all, it’s the wild spending and curbing of freedoms. Which, frankly, is a LOT like the liberals were screaming during the Bush administration.
From the middle, both sides look EXACTLY the same. Scary.
“I worry a great deal for our country. We’re facing a massive, growing divide that could very well rival the era of race riots and war protests forty years ago. Back then, two opposing sides screaming at each other led to massacres of white college kids, black folks just trying to get through the day, and a couple hundred thousand of our young men (just for starters). What will to (sic) opposing sides screaming at each other lead to now?” YIKES TAMBO! Excuse me, but I was 21 when Kent State occurred. 4 students were killed by the Ohio National Guard in a protest of the invasion of Cambodia, and the NATIONAL consensus at the time was that this was a terrible mistake committed by inexperienced individual guardsmen out of fear. My college (UNC-Chapel Hill) and many, many others simply closed for the rest of the year. More college students have been killed recently by lone psychos than were killed while protesting during the highly charged Vietnam era. I participated in many peaceful protests, and peaceful protests were really the norm. I grew up in a Southern town in the 50’s and was in elementary school when our schools became integrated. There were lots of marches, but no wild riots here, and no deaths. Not to say that there weren’t any elsewhere, but the whole country was not in mayhem by any means. Large numbers of people can be manipulated and led to do stupid things, even when they all are in agreement, as in the Jim Jones tragedy. I think a careful review of the history of the eras you are invoking will find that most of the tragedies that occured were when people were manipulated by to do crazy things (sometimes to themselves) by individuals trying to gain power, and not because of personal convictions. There were very few truly cold blooded confrontations of opposing sides. The scariest thing I remember about the period were the assisinations of John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. I don’t think anyone can really say for sure why these killings occurred, but evidence does not point to their being caused by “opposite sides screaming at one another”, but more likely by deranged individuals or a small extremist groups like the one responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing or the Unibomber. Now the Vietnam War is a completely separate issue. Most of us are still scratching our heads trying to figure out how we got into it and why we stayed there. A Democratic president was our leader at the onset, and it was a Republican president who ended it.