The Notebook

I was just doing some (uncharacteristic) organizing, and I unearthed my daily planner from 10^th grade. Naturally, I sat down to read it (obviously abandoning the whole "organizing" thing), and became immediately engrossed. There were perplexing tasks that my 16-year-old self had written, such as "BRING IN WATER GUN!" and humbling ones, such as the take-home trigonometry problem that I am wholly unable to do, ten years later. Largely, however, they made me cringe. To wit:

Watch Party o’ 5!!!!!!!

What I like about this is my use of “o’,” in what you will soon see is the first of many attempts to be clever. Furthermore, I very much like the sense of excitement I manage to convey with my many exclamation points (7, I counted). But oh, that Bailey...

Dub tape for [friend]

This was the mid 1990's. Would you like to know what was on this tape? Because I did in fact write the track listing down in the planner. Here’s a sampling:

Shoop

THE MACARENA (kill. me.)

Be My Lover

No Diggity

Ironic

Gangsta’s Paradise

Here Comes the Hotstepper (I will pay you eleventy billion dollars if you can tell me what this song was about.)

What if God was One of Us

Wonderwall

Waterfalls (i.e., Don’t go chasing them)

Total Eclipse of the Heart (Disco remix!)

100% Pure Love (From the back to the middle and around again/I’m gonna be there ‘til the end, 100% pure love…You’re welcome.)

Cotton Eye Joe (The only thing sadder than this song being on there in the first place? The fact that I remember being SO excited to actually “catch” it when I was making the tape.)

Misery (Soul Asylum? Anyone?)

Rhythm of the Night

Do you not want a copy of this, like, right now?! And that’s only Side 1!

Have a little fun! Partay!

Please note: This is an actual task that I, of my own volition, chose to write in there, complete with a checkbox that I ACTUALLY CHECKED OFF.

Do [Teacher]

Since I feel very strongly that I would’ve remembered doing my teacher, I can only assume that I meant “do the assignment for the teacher's class.”

C Word Vocab Test

Think about it--how awesome would an actual “c word” vocabulary quiz be? Just the c-word, over and over, in a multitude of phrases that you had to define.

Wait anxiously by the phone

Oh, lord. I cannot believe I’m even mentioning this one. Apparently (and I say apparently, because many things I had written in the planner related to this task were crossed out), I was waiting for a guy I had a crush on to call me. I’d met him at a party, and he was a friend of one of my friends. Anyway, I decided that the above was the only way to truly assign the task of awaiting said call.

Wait, it gets worse.

I…oh, boy. Deep breaths. I, uh, MAY have written out a list of potential conversation topics, should the conversation have hit a lull. Again, they are largely crossed out, however, I could make out “Last night’s Simpsons” “Why not on team?” (Basketball? Baseball? Also, why did I care?) and…ready for this?

“WEATHER.”

Tuesday April 8—Romeo and Juliet Comes Out on Tape! Rent it! Buy it!

There is a significance to this, which I thought I might have mentioned before, but I just checked, and I did not.: In my teen years, I had a MASSIVE crush on Leonardo DiCaprio. Like, huge. (Amanda, I know you can relate, in light of your mad JTT love.) I cannot convey how strong my feelings were at the time, except to say that I saw Titanic four (4) times in the theater. Furthermore, I was so very in love with his smoking hotness in Romeo and Juliet that I was counting down the days until the movie came out on video (evidently, April 8), and I could buy a copy of my very own. This wouldn't have been so bad, had I not asked the Blockbuster clerk if I could also purchase the lifesize promotional cut-out of him.

Smooth.