Throwback Thursday: Highlights from 1997

In the fall of 1997, I was a senior in high school. I was not academically inclined, so I had quite a few study hall periods between all my art classes. If I wasn’t hard at work on my next weekly sketch, I was bent over a spiral notebook, spilling my deepest thoughts onto the page.

Here’s a glimpse into my mind at that time. My thoughts of today are in italics.

9.17.97 It’s D-lunch study hall again and I have nothing to do. Ok, so I was dreaming about our future house, my room specifically and I want to paint the ceiling a dark purplish blue color and get a ton of those little sticky glow in the dark stars to put on it. That would be SO cool. Ok, I legit think this would still look really cool. What can I say, I’m 7 years old at heart. Still, the idea of painting over that is what keeps me from ever doing it. 

9.18.97 I really have to go to the bathroom- if you know what I mean. I feel like my hair is absolutely repulsive. It’s funny, I’m always so concerned about what I look like but I never notice much about what other people look like. I don’t know what I meant by the first sentence. Maybe I had to go #2. And my hair was pretty much the best it was ever going to look in those days.

9.24.97 People really need to come equipped with brake lights, turn signals and warning signs. After walking to study hall, weaving my way in and out of clumps of slow or non-moving people, I wish there was some way to know what the person in front of me was planning to do. It’s very annoying to be walking behind someone who keeps slowing down, or worse yet, spins around to go in a different direction. Maybe I’m just a klutz, but I crash into so many people, it’s ridiculous. This was before I was a licensed driver, and so I did not know then that all the turn signals, brake lights and signage in the world would still not help you really know what the hell the slowing driver in front of you is going to do.

10.6.17  Well, it’s been a while since I wrote. I really don’t feel much like writing, but Mrs. Hadeka says that 95% of what even the greatest writers write is just junk. So here I am trying to make the 95% junk.  This is great! I’ve definitely kept up cranking out a lot of junk over the years. 

11.5.97 I was just walking down the hallway and I came around the corner and this girl was talking to a teacher about some quiz or something. The teacher said “92” and the girl went “YES!” and pulled back her arm. I was thinking how funny it would be if she elbowed me as I walked by. I still crack myself up with these kinds of thoughts…. like “what if such and such happened?” and then I will laugh to myself and people wonder about me. 

11.6.97 Well, my skirt is coming along pretty good (disregarding the fact that I had to stop working on it because it got stuck in the sewing machine and I can’t get it out.) I laughed so hard I cried when I read this just now. That skirt was a sexy crushed blue velvet number that I was so proud of once I got it unstuck from the sewing machine. I wore it for years!

12.16.97 This morning was a bit weird.  had to make up the Chem test that I missed last week, and the sophs who were in the classroom when I went in were dissecting fetal pigs. Ewww. What a horrible thing to do. What do they do, get a pregnant sow and open her up and take out the fetus? What do they do with the sow? Eat her? How gross! That makes me so sad. What is up with the world today? Yes, I was a bit naive at this time. I don’t know why it didn’t cross my mind that sows actually had litters of piglets, so it wasn’t like a one-fetal-pig-per-sow ratio. And duh, they obviously would have gotten them from the meat-packing industry when they killed the pregnant sows. Of course I still think it’s a horrible practice, but we’ve got a long way to go before people give up their precious meats.

Well, that in a nutshell was my view of the world in 1997. Pretty sheltered, yes. Of course I left out a lot of my deepest blatherings… the “Why doesn’t he like me as much as I like him?”, and “I can’t believe I thought he liked me, I’m so stupid.” Ya’ll don’t need to be reading that.