spynotes ::
  January 16, 2007
All in the family

After I posted yesterday�s horrifying entry of teenage angst, I found the pi�ce de r�sistance, the definitive cringe entry. It was a slip of paper that slipped out of the pages of the journal: a plan for winning Boy B�s affections, complete with enumerated list, the names of those who would assist me and check boxes to indicate completion. I suspected this, but now I�m certain: Hell looks like 13.

The last half of the journal was blank � I switched to a new book when the cover of this one broke off. The replacement was a spiral-bound rainbow of paper with a sparkly unicorn on the cover � worth a cringe in and of itself. Because of the blank pages, I almost missed a weird diagram on the back page. The title read �Lifeline� and consisted of a line zigzagging around the page with years marked off at intervals, stopping at 30. For each year up to 13, I had written in teeny tiny print a list of the things I remember about my life from that time. It was eye-opening � things that seemed important at 13 I sometimes don�t even remember at 39. But of course, 39 isn�t even in the picture. At 13, it was an unimaginable age for me to become. My mom at the time was just 34.

It�s interesting rereading your past. Painful, of course, but interesting. I can see a few threads of my future self running through the foreign material. Our ability to blur out the past is amazing. What I remember of thirteen is rose-colored by comparison to what I see in these pages. I also have a tendency to remember things in black and white, the good versus the bad. But my writing, however awful, reveals a lot of grey � a great deal of confusion about just about everything.

AJ is keeping a journal now. We found him one of those classic black and white composition books, but this one is designed for those learning to write. The top half of the page is blank, for drawings. The bottom half has those special handwriting practice lines, with the extra dashed line in the middle to aid with scale of lowercase and capital letters. AJ writes in it every few days or so. He is a minimalist with his prose. It is rare for an entry to be more than one sentence long and unheard of to be more than three (I should take a lesson or two from him). The last entry was from when he was sick last week: �I throew up yesterday.� It includes a picture of three figures. A bald one with a sad face is patting a second figure on the head. This figure has an o for a mouth and something appears to be spewing out of it onto the floor. Another sad faced figure, this time with Marlo Thomas hair, is mopping up the mess. It�s utterly hilarious.

Meanwhile, Mr. Spy is trying to venture into diarizing territory. He has never kept a diary before. But as a professional writer, he is feeling some pressure to start a blog with an eye toward a book contract. He�s been trying to figure out how to come up with a name and topic that is focused enough to be useful for book development but broad enough that he won�t get bored with it. He�s not so familiar with blog culture, so he�s been doing his research by reading and analyzing what he sees, which offers me a whole different perspective on blogs and blogging. I�m afraid he might scare himself off. But hopefully he�ll plunge in one of these days. As he likes to say, another piranha in the tank.

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