Day 2: last social contacts

Sunday. No cannibalism yet. We were more social than is probably advisable - P's godmother came for a very disorganized lunch, and we ended up having dinner with the M's, who are currently camped out in our back garden en route from Argentina to the wilds of northern California. It would be very helpful if someone who knew something about viral spread and computer modeling could provide some guidelines w/r/t 'social distancing': I know that being within six feet and more than a few minutes increases your risk of respiratory exposure, but in terms of fomite spread from surfaces - what if you remain at least six feet from each other but moving around the same house? using the same tea-towels to dry your plate? who knows.
It is hard, I am finding, not to consider the more meta-view: a virus that removes up to 10% of the human population (mostly sick and elderly) relatively quickly and painlessly, discourages casual air and large cruise ship travel, and takes developed-world hubris down a serious notch or two, sounds like it would start to address the one problem we have that's even bigger than coronavirus, i.e. environmental damage and climate change. However, the cruise companies and airline industries will get bailouts at taxpayer expense, and Jeff Bezos will profit enormously from everyone doing all their shopping from the coronavirus-free comfort of their homes rather than braving the outside the world, and more and more people will become homeless because they can't go to work because they're sick or their kid's school is closed or the small business they work for folded or any number of reasons, and on and on until end times actually come. (Incidentally, I can't find easily isolatable mortality statistics for homelessness, but I'd bet on average it's more lethal to be homeless than to have coronavirus, since in California average life expectancy for a homeless person is, according to a Kaiser study I just found, age 48 (women) and 51 (men) respectively.) So there's that cheerful thought to start the day with.
Today I am headed back to clinic, to see if the nonsensical policy of Friday has been replaced with any less nonsensical policy. I would much, much, much rather stay right where I am, which is tucked up on the sofa in the dark with my lovely girl warmly snoozing next to me (we had a living room campout last night, mainly an excuse for cocoa and to sleep by the fire), dreaming of the dragons I have promised her we can repaint the dining table with later this week when we are home together on Thursday.

Coronavirus day 1

Of course it's not actually day 1 of coronavirus, but it feels close enough to the beginning of our personal mini-Armageddon that I have decided to call it day 1: school is officially closed as of yesterday, and so la p'tite and I are now holed up at home, shunning contact with the plague-ridden outside world as best we can (sort of). Next week starts home-schooling, or something approximating it; for now it is a question of embracing our cabin fever and making the most of it.
I am secretly looking forward to the home-schooling aspect of things - madam, it should be said is most definitively _not_, but we have at least managed to make a list of 'things we want to learn about while at home together next week': we are going to
- do a report about volcanoes,
- do a calligraphy project
- learn about the American revolution, and
- write a story each. Her writing prompt is, 'what if a kid found a bomb under the teacher's desk?' prompted by an exhaustive, disorganized, gleeful, improbable search for bombs throughout the house this morning, mainly, we suspect, in an effort to avoid the family meeting. Trophy BF attended the meeting remotely (note to self: buy stock in Zoom; it will be the only stock not in freefall at the moment) and was very game: he too was given a writing prompt ('what if a sorbet jumped into the pool while crying?' which he will doubtless manage to do something brilliant with), participated in the long-distance gym lesson organized (I use the term loosely) by madam, and suggested a science project for us to do, which we may or may not get to (we are currently reading a book while hiding inside the massive furniture-and-blanket fort that dominates the living room, and have shown no interest in coming out). I am not totally sure how exactly I'm going to convince her that we should sit up at the table Learning About Volcanoes, but this feels like an opportunity to try out what home schooling would be like, so I'm tentatively excited. We have gotten as far as making ourselves a plaster of Paris volcano, which needs painting before we do the vinegar and baking soda trick on it; the kit came with a geode (which we dutifully cracked open) and a pumice stone (which I will use to scrub my feet in the bath tonight).

The interesting thing is that as long as I leave her alone to get on with her projects, she's perfectly content: she's been reading in her fort (quote: "I love books! the reason books are better than screens is that the batteries never give out") in her pyjamas most of the day, and has been quite lovely, without apparently any need for external input. She has come up several times requesting food, hugs, or, twice, 'a tango competition,' but otherwise she's been quite self-entertaining.

(As have I: I have dug out a monster load of crabgrass and oxalis from the front garden, cooked meals for the next three days, and re-read the first half of La Sombra del Viento, actually looking up the words I don't know this time round; the majority of the vocabulary I am pleased to report is gratifyingly obscure and I am learning some English words along with the Spanish. Google gave me 'groyne' as the English translation for 'espigon,' for example, which turns out to be a low sea wall constructed to check erosion; likewise 'sortilegio' is 'sortilege,' which (duh, if you didn't know) is the historical practice of fortunetelling by drawing a random card. So there.) I should also say it's been chucking it down rain all day today; it's not just coronavirus.
Anyway. A moment to reflect on the whole coronavirus thing: I understand that the point currently is to slow down transmission so that we can avoid overwhelming the health care system's capacity with a huge dramatic peak in cases and possibly, maybe, give the CDC time to develop a vaccine for this thing before too many people die of it, but given that the healthcare system can't actually do much about it except for Tylenol, oxygen and a ventilator if it gets really bad, it's hard not to wonder whether we should be concentrating our efforts on getting everyone in the country a home O2 sat monitor and a thermometer so that they can just call the oxygen delivery company when they are ready for home O2, and 911 when the home O2 isn't enough and a ventilator is in order; ditto Tylenol. Likewise, despite all the efforts to develop a PCR test for viral RNA to figure who has live virus, a test for COVID19 antibodies - which would identify both who has an ongoing infection plus who has recovered from it and therefore can go out into the world and do their work - might ultimately be of more utility.  
The situation at work feels ludicrous: the official word on Friday was 'phone triage all patients; if there is anyone you can't rule out COVID19 by phone, then refer them to public health,' which is deeply, deeply nonsensical on several levels. (The only way, given that we know there is community transmission in asymptomatic people, to 'rule out' COVID19 is with a lab test, not a phone call, ergo if we followed this policy, we would be sending literally every patient to Public Health, and Public Health would be sending them right back to us because they are still completely overwhelmed and therefore only testing people with known exposures plus symptoms; therefore the policy makes zero sense, but all the administrators keep repeating it as if it does make sense and I am apparently just being difficult and unhelpful). It is very, very tempting to just quit my job and sit at home and wait this whole thing out, except for I need to go out there and pretend there is something we can do about COVID19 in order to earn money to pay for the house to which I would dearly love to just retreat).
We do not (no surprise) have anywhere near enough N-95 masks at work (five, at last count; they are technically meant to be disposed of between patients, ha, no news on when more will be forthcoming), and the fit-testing didn't happen until yesterday (finally organized by the medical assistant, NOT the administration), so our pants are well and truly down. What I have done is filch one N95 from each place I work thus far plus a small one for la p'tite should the need arise, seal each one in a ziploc bag labelled with each day of the week, and I will reuse each mask weekly for the whole day at work, covered with a surgical mask (or a plastic face shield, if I can get one, since there's limited evidence to suggest that this might prolong the life of an N95, but of course these are also not available for love or money in any of the places I work), and then reseal them in their ziploc baggies, leaving 7 days for the virus to hopefully die until the next time I need to reuse the mask. It's a faff, and it's far from perfect, and I will doubtless get sick with this eventually, but hopefully I will not take anyone down with me. On the plus side, the lack of air travel is probably brilliant for the environment...

In defense of a language that can defend itself just fine, thanks.

     Trophy boyfriend and I had an argument this last weekend, and it was one of those really satisfying arguments where you know exactly what you are arguing about, there are no actual emotions involved, and you are thus able to bring the whole thing to a prompt and satisfactory conclusion... not. It started with my irritation at his overuse of the word 'whimsical,' or to be fair, my perception of his overuse of the word, and spiralled from there into the murky depths of overgeneralized and slightly hysterical accusations of what, exactly, I couldn't say, but it wasn't comfortable and the resolution will only come, I suspect, when we both decide to just forget about it and go back to whatever it is we usually talk about. 

     But the whole episode has got me thinking about language, and English in particular, and trying to puzzle out why the vagaries of language are so acutely personal. Is it just tribalism in disguise? An attempt by Strunk & White (and me! me too!) to lord it over the unlettered unwashed masses so we can temporarily feel better about ourselves while we contemplate the dark void that awaits us after we die? Do I disdain the incorrect (or "incorrect") use of a adjective where an adverb should go because I like the dopamine rush of educated superiority? Is it elitism? (The rise of Donald Trump depends on trashing elitism, so clearly elitism isn't all bad, but...)

     Full disclosure: I was inoculated at a deeply impressionable age (thirteen) by a living caricature of a women's college bluestocking who taught me (joy!) how to diagram a sentence, why it is logical for gerunds when used as nouns to go with possessive pronouns, and the various uses of a semicolon, and (surprise!) I ate that shit UP. (We also read our way through the high points of the old-white-mostly male English-language canon: Chaucer to... I think Katherine Mansfield was probably about as modern as she could stand to teach. Obviously incomplete, but she only had us for a year, and given the students she had to cope with, an ambitious start.)

    So anyway. Fast forward to a few years later, when the following questions appeared on a marine biology seminar final exam: 

Q. What is the correct plural of the word 'genus'? 

Q. What is the correct singular of the word 'algae'? 

There was some wailing from all the other students about how the question had nothing to do with marine biology knowledge, and wasn't fair, etc., and of course, little Hermione Granger that I am, I wrote 'genera' and 'alga' in my neatest, smuggest handwriting and thought how great it was that the professor gave a shit about things I knew and other people didn't, then spent several years feeling embarrassed about what a little prissy brat I was, and now I'm more grownup and everything's gone all shades of grey on me. I can see and agree with (you will all be relieved to know) the other students: they're right. The question wasn't about marine biology. And there are way more important things to worry about. But which word _do_ you use? Are you a data/datum person? or do you even know that this is a thing?     

     Specifically on the subject of Latin plurals, there is plenty of vitriol and ridicule being hurled across both sides of the line, (making the 'who cares, move on' point of view seem much the most attractive), but really we all know who's going to end up winning the argument. Both sides are of course perfectly right: the winning side, the side with way more people on it, would say that Latin plurals are outdated, elitist, ridiculous, inefficient, and make it harder to learn English for non-native speakers (viz the late, great Tom Lehrer making fun of Harvard football teams playing at various 'stadia' rather than 'stadiums'). And the losing side protests, but but but, Latin plurals can be elegant, precise, a reminder of the etymology of a word, and it's weird and wonderful and beautiful to have different ways of making a plural depending on which strand of English the word came from. 

     I think for me ultimately this is the argument that pushes me over the line into the arms of the heroically stupid defenders of a static language. To use the word 'genera' rather than 'genuses' is not just to adhere to an outdated silly rule just to prove you know more than the people who don't (although yes, it can be that as well). It's lighting a candle on a Day of the Dead altar: on the highest shelf is a picture of a Roman centurion, far from his Mediterranean home, shivering in the bloody awful weather in some fort along Hadrian's wall in the second century; lower down, here is a group shot of English schoolboys swotting away at their Latin prep before they grew up to be (bottom shelf) the mustachio'ed Victorian gentleman scientists responsible for the propagation of the taxonomic nomenclature, all because, wow, how crazy is that, that there were all these proto-Italians running around in England at the beginning of written history. 

     Likewise, I was given a gag gift for my birthday recently - a pair of socks inscribed with the motto, "Thou hath balls," with a frankly awesome picture of a guy arm-wrestling a medieval lion - and, yup, it's deeply, deeply obnoxious to point out that it should be, 'thou hast,' not 'thou hath,' and again, really who cares anyway. But getting it right is also a way of saying, hey, Shakespeare and whoever you were who wrote the King James Bible, and all you other Tudor-through-Stuart bookish types: thank you. That was a lot of gorgeous rich fantastic stuff you gave us. We still read it and remember it with at least a tiny bit of accuracy. What's more important, to just say thank you to my friend for the socks? or to say thank you to Shakespeare for the language? I don't know. I want a graceful way to do both, and if the sockmakers had just run 'thou hath' through their Renaissance grammar checker (Google: get on that, please) and put 'thou hast' instead, I could have saved myself a paragraph's worth of angst over how much of my own small-mindedness I'm willing to reveal in a public blog.

     There are a lot of things that the English took in their nearly successful attempt at world domination that were not right, not fair, not OK, and which have contributed to a lot of people in the developing world living in dire circumstances, but language - you can take it and still leave it with its owners! How terrific is that? No guilt or apology required! English is both omnivorous and voracious, and as a result we famously clock over half a million words, compared to 100-200k per Romance language. (A quick internet search just told me that Arabic, meanwhile, has got over 12 million words, which is amazing and makes me want to try and learn Arabic immediately right now so I can find out what can they say that we can't). I am sure speakers of Swedish, Inuit, Tagalog, etc. would say the same about their languages, blah blah blah, but I feel a patriotism about the English language that I have never felt about an actual country. English is sprawling, agile, muscular, magical, volatile, dirty, soaring, miraculous. English is fucking great. 

Here is the writer A. A. Gill talking to a group of schoolkids, and I suspect him of secretly being on the fence himself with regards to language use: in grammatical, correctly punctuated, eloquent sentences packed with SAT words, he makes the case for everyone being allowed to do whatever they want with English.

"I told them this was their language, this English, this most marvellous and expressive cloak of meaning and imagination. This great, exclamatory, illuminating song, it belonged to anyone who found it in their mouths. There was no wrong way to say it, or write it, the language couldn’t be compelled or herded, it couldn’t be tonsured or pruned, pollarded or plaited, it was as hard as oaths and as subtle as rhyme. It couldn’t be forced or bullied or policed by academics; it wasn’t owned by those with flat accents; nobody had the right to tell them how to use it or what to say. There are no rules and nobody speaks incorrectly, because there is no correctly: no high court of syntax. And while everyone can speak with the language, nobody speaks for the language. Not grammars, not dictionaries. They just run along behind, picking up discarded usages. This English doesn’t belong to examiners or teachers. All of you already own the greatest gift, the highest degree this country can bestow. It’s on the tip of your tongue."

His point is terrific, and salient, and... would not come across nearly so well were he speaking less articulately. So here's what I think my own philosophy towards language is going to be: Add words. Find new meanings. Build new and more colourful phrases. Be flexible. Allow language to grow. But also: know and use lots of words, honour old words, understand how the different parts of language work, and let's encourage our kids to do the same. It's not elitism, it's gratitude for the astonishing wealth we have inherited. 

No princesses allowed

I recently read a precis of a study which analysed various Disney princess films by percentage of words spoken by male and female characters, and was both unsurprised and horrified to read that, on average, the male characters get a substantial majority of the lines spoken (roughly 60-80% in the so-called "second-generation" princess films), including the ones in whom the central character(s) are female. The Little Mermaid, which has a female protagonist AND a female villain, still gives 68% of the lines to male characters - perhaps because (this isn't icky at all) Ariel literally gives up her voice in order to be with her man. My daughter's obsession with Frozen, before either of us had ever seen it (such is the power of marketing) forced me to set a daily limit of five minutes' conversation about Elsa and her ice powers lest I start howling with boredom, but I was convinced by an otherwise usually sensible friend that Frozen was better than most Disney films from a feminist perspective. So I watched it on the plane and... despite being about the (frequently pouty, histrionic) relationship between two (predictably Barbie-pretty teenage) sisters, Frozen clocks in at 59% of the dialogue spoken by male characters. Here's the weird part: this is an overall increase in male dialogue over the earliest Disney films (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella), in which female characters at least got to talk a bit more, even if there is plenty of disturbing chauvinism to be found in the content. The researchers attributed this to modern Disney films' having a larger cast of characters these days than in the old days, and nearly all the supporting characters with lines are male, because....drumroll.... "laziness."
I am confused by this. Laziness? Really? Men have an average of 1.9 m2 of skin, as opposed to women's 1.6 m2; thus it should be _quicker_ if anything to draw a female character, especially an underweight teenager, even if you do take up a little of the difference with attractively displayed cleavage:
Maybe it's not the drawing that's more difficult - maybe it's really hard to find unemployed young female actors in Hollywood to do the voices.... Um, not. Or maybe, just maybe, whoever is making the artistic decisions at Disney is walking around with a special helmet strapped to his head which filters out the voices of all women, and the appearance of all women other than anorexic pretty teenage girls, such that they believe themselves to be living in a world mostly populated by other men and voiceless teen girls, and gosh, yes, it would take a lot of work to remove that helmet and recognize that the world is actually populated half by women (!), many of whom are not anorexic pretty teenagers but who are nonetheless doing interesting and valuable things.

Which gets to another beef I have with Disney princesses, besides the fact that they don't get to say quite enough (although interestingly, all except Aladdin pass the Bechdel test): why are they all teenagers? I have done some poking around the Internet and this doesn't seem to be something that has caused that much comment in the blogosphere, but it seems obvious to me that if you are making films for children, that they should be _about_ children. So, why are all the princesses physically developed adolescents rather than straight-up girls? Obvious answer: so that you can sexualize them. This is presumably more fun and titillating for any heterosexual males involved in the process of making Disney films (boobs are always more fun than no boobs, right?), plus you don't have to do any hard thinking about what to have as a happy ending ("I know! A handsome prince can fall in love with her! Our work here is done. Let's go for coffee.")  Happy endings for bona fide kids, I suspect, would be much more interesting and varied; my daughter's goal for this kindergarten year, for instance, is to meet a unicorn; a classmate would like to be a panda wrapped in a taco - and I do see that finding a happy ending that all small children could unilaterally agree was awesome might be difficult. Surely, however, some compromise could be found - a taco party with pandas and unicorns? Disney, make that movie, and I will promise to take my kid to it.

Here's my totally predictable feminist-rant theory: the conspiracy to make girls feel ugly and incomplete without a male, and to be willing to submit to dominant male voices in their lives, has to start early in order to get it really stuck in their psyches, because if it's not really truly entrenched in their little brains before they hit sexual awakening, then you might not be able to make quite so many squillions of dollars down the line selling them eye-liner, push-up bras, botox, boob jobs, magazines advertising 10 best blow-job tips, wedding catering services, and diet pills. I'm open to other theories, but until I hear a more convincing one, or until Disney starts making movies that are better for girls, our house is going to stay a no-princess zone.

Guest post, wrttten by my trophy boyfriend

Almost directly copied and pasted from an email, as followup to a discussion re: insulin levels, diabetic risk, and obesity. Mostly the thing about slavery I think is probably dead accurate, and it's a theory I've never heard before. He came up with it all on his own, 'cause he's wicked smaht.

"There’s plenty of evidence that high levels of circulating insulin trigger a shift in metabolic pathways.  Fatty molecules are preferentially moved from blood-borne lipoproteins to adipocytes, leaving other tissues in a state of fat deprivation.  The brain reads this as a state of relative starvation, so it slows metabolism and activates hunger and craving.  This triggers the intake of more food, and coupled with the increase in adipocytes, this cranks insulin levels up again.  The cycle spirals upwards, and the end result is obesity, constant craving, tissue insulin resistance and high levels of circulating insulin.

 

"There are a bunch of experiments in which lowering circulating insulin makes lab mice pretty much impervious to diet-induced obesity.  There are also human experiments in which low carb, low glycemic index diets reduce weight more effectively and result in higher metabolic rates (measured by calories burned) than a low fat diet with the exact same protein and calorie intake.  Low carb diets also seem to improve post-prandial energy availability (no “post-lunch dip”), which encourages activity, further lowering insulin resistance and burning more calories.

 

"From a teleological point of view, this all makes perfect sense.  Our endocrine/nutrition systems evolved long before our ancestors learned to cook or grind grains to produce high glycemic index foods.  For millions of years, the only high glycemic index foods available to mammals in large quantities were ripened fruits, which appeared for a limited time in great abundance--but mostly in autumn, just before the long deprivation of winter.  To take advantage of this bounty, it makes sense that we would have evolved a metabolic switch, turned on by large spikes in circulating insulin.  We evolved to take advantage of the harvest season by flipping into storage mode and building up our fat stores for the lean times ahead.

 

"I also think the high rate of obesity, diabetes [and salt-responsive hypertension] in African Americans (which includes all income levels) may be a direct result of unnatural selection pressures of slavery.  On slave ships in particular, fat storage and reduced metabolic rates (not to mention sodium retention) came with a distinct survival advantage.  The slaves with the highest circulating insulin levels survived the voyage."

So, yuh. I've absolutely heard it posited that metabolic systems best attuned to survive relative scarcity will then be more prone to obesity etc. when faced with caloric over-availability, but the idea that specifically the single event of the metabolically extremely traumatic trans-Pacific voyage would be enough to act as a defining Darwinian moment in the genetic makeup of an entire ethnic group is intriguing, and absolutely makes sense. What I can't find are any studies comparing propensity for diabetes/salt-responsive hypertension in Africans and African-Americans with similar starting weights, diets, and exercise habits. 

A sad, forlorn little post

Back when I was significantly younger with longer legs and fewer stretch marks etc etc than I have now, I had a kind, clever, and funny friend with a crush on me. I adored him, and we spent a lot of time together, but I didn't reciprocate the crush, and, being an extremely decent and restrained human being, he very seldom pushed the issue. He did, however, take me out to dinner for my birthday, and gave me a necklace he had made. On strictly aesthetic grounds, it did not rate highly: it was a small sand-dollar, painted in garish red and yellow acrylic paint, with a paperclip hot-glue-gunned on to the back through which a string was threaded - a competent kindergartener could just about have pulled it off - but it had a very sweet and personal message written on the back in ballpoint pen, and I have treasured it for the last nearly 20 years. Part of my attachment I think comes from pride that I have been at least once in my lifetime capable of inciting open adoration in such an extremely worthwhile human being, and the other half of my attachment to the necklace is penance for how callously I ultimately treated his feelings. (I have since apologized, and he - now happily married with children, still a spectacular person and a once-a-year friend - has forgiven, but I still squirm with horrible shame when I think about him). I planned to keep it in my jewelry box forever.

Beach mementos painted in bright colours, however, are kryptonite for four year olds, and tonight I went into my daughter's bedroom for nightly story-plus-cuddle and discovered the necklace smashed into red and yellow dust on the floor. I said, "Oh, no, no, no, my necklace, no" and started to cry, triggering howling guilty sobs from my daughter, who wanted to be comforted and told it was OK (which is what I usually say when things get broken), but of course it wasn't at all OK and I couldn't get myself together to pretend it was. Ultimately we had a reconciliation of sorts, albeit an unsatisfactory one: I took her on my knee and cuddled her and told her how sad I was about the necklace, and that it would really help me if she could tell me that she was sorry, and she tried very hard to put the blame on a friend who'd been over to play earlier, but ultimately did apologize, and then we read stories together and she tried to be silly to cheer me up, and I said that I wasn't quite ready to be silly yet because I was still feeling sad about my necklace, and then she started to sniff and asked for a hug and then she fell asleep as I cuddled her. She will wake up tomorrow having forgotten all about it, and I will absorb the hurt because she is the present and the future whereas the necklace was and is now past, (and besides, just now there is another extremely worthwhile man who inexplicably openly adores me) but right at this moment it just really hurts, and I can't bear to look at the pile of smashed sand-dollar bits on the kitchen counter.

The point of which is to say: very soon I will remember to be grateful for what I do have, and I am really, really sorry if I ever broke anything of yours - literal or metaphorical - that you minded about.

Diaries so awful they will give you insomnia

There is a rite of passage that happens sooner or later to those of lucky enough to have had a happy, stable upbringing, which is that the doting parents who have until now been lovingly hoarding all your precious childhood treasures for you suddenly decide that they are sick of living with a basement/attic full of your crap, become fractionally less loving, and issue an ultimatum for you to clear out your stuff already. My sister is in the enviable position of having actually semi-useful/valuable childhood crap (several dozen antique 78's, well-ordered files of sheet music, etc.), but over the last week I have come to suspect that I might have been better served actually saving scatological samples over what I did save, which was every journal I have ever kept, starting at age eleven.
The Moth Radio Hour has a program where people can come on and read bits of their adolescent diaries out loud, and some of them are pretty excruciating, but rereading mine (I am up to age 14 at this point) has been a descent into self-loathing I wouldn't have dreamed possible. Very occasionally my 1986 cluelessness will evoke a twinge of sympathy in my 2015 self ("I wonder what I will be like when I am old? Will I have kids? Who will I be married to?"), but generally I am completely horrified by what a bumptious, self-important, boring little turd I was. Is this normal? I have met some pretty awful preteens and teens, but (perverse shades of my former narcissism still persist, apparently) I am fairly sure I was more horrible than all of them. I originally kept the diaries because I was sure they were full of deep truths, and then that eventually morphed into a more realistic "they'll help me remember what happened," which after I had actually become a mother myself turned into, "well, they'll be a good laugh for her when the time comes," and now I think the only conceivable use they could possibly have AT ALL is to keep me honest and humble once my own child turns disgusting. Assuming she emerges in one piece from her own adolescence, then I'll be allowed to get rid of them.
I can't quite stand to post any of the more egregiously self-obsessed preening entries, but here's a little glimpse, written just before my twelfth birthday:
"August 30th, Dear Eleanor [after Eleanor of Aquitaine, an obsession between age 7-12ish]:
D. was laughing at me because I told her that I wanted it to snow eight inches on the morning of my birthday party. I would wake up around nine, to a beautiful crystal world made, it seems, especially for me. The snow would be deep, but early in the morning the little dew-fairies [please bear in mind that I have been menstruating for 6 months at this point] would clear away the snow from the raods, the early morning sun flashing on their silver wing tips. No, I think i would rather wake up, say, at sevenish to see all the fairies shoveling the snow in the pale glow of the winter sunrise. Lovely! For some obscure reason I was the first person in the Seattle area, so I would be the very first to witness it. Then either a bubble or a white cloud [...] would drift through an open window lift me up and I would float, shimmering, a few feet above the ground. Then a whole team of snow-white does and stags with bells on would come out and stamp about, and wake up everyone.
"August 31st. New School Year Resolutions: I will practice my clarinet at least four times a week. I will not put off homework. I will work UNNATURALLY hard at social studies, language and maths. I will write in this journal once a day, probably in bed. I will not "stuff" my locker with old school work, but instead have a folder to put everything in. I will "keep up my physical appearance," i.e. not pick my nose, wear earrings every day, shower every evening, etc. etc. I will not say silly things that I will later regret, and I will not lie. If I buy cookies, I will pay out of my own money. I will try my very hardest to keep ALL of these resolutions. When I get my new diary I will not tear the pages out of it."
There follows about twenty pages of obsessing about whether Giles Sydnor did or did not have any idea who I was and why doesn't he ever look at me and we used to be "really close" (by which I meant that we sat next to each other in art class for a term, arm-wrestled when the teacher wasn't looking, passed notes under the table for a few weeks, and he once lent me his MAD magazine).  I really really wish I could have played a video tape for my poor deluded 11-year-old self of the moment 20 or so years later that I discovered that the captain/host of the tugboat tour/party I was attending with some friends was none other than the Man Himself (by then a magnificently successful techie who had taken youthful retirement to concentrate on his boat fetish). I blushed to the roots of my hair and confessed to a life-threatening junior-high-school length crush on him, to which he replied, "That's funny. What's your name again?" Just think of all the time, paper, and biro ink I could saved myself. Oh, well.