1990

Thank you Facebook ladies, for helping me pick a year in my life to write about. I will eventually get to each of the years that were picked but I decided on 1990; not because it had the most interesting journal entries but because it had one journal entry that was pivotal in my desire to write fiction and poetry.

In 1990 I was eleven years old. Most of that particular journal was about the boys I liked and the girls I hated in school. I did slip a short entry into that journal about starting puberty that year, which could explain the darkening nature of my journals from that point forward.

I wasn't the most attractive eleven-year-old. In fact, I remember a little chant the kids had for me back then. It went like this: "Patty Fatty two by four, couldn't fit through the bathroom door." But hey, no permanent damage. I managed to lose all the weight over the next year and entered junior high as thin as the other girls, if not a little thinner.

My sister, my guide, my mentor; God love her and she knows I do. But when I was asking her for advice on how to meet boys, she might have wanted to let me know that writing it all down on a little piece of brown paper, might not be a wise idea. Here's why:

June 16, 1990
My sister made me mad today. I am okay now. I wrote down all the tips my sister gave me on how to meet boys on the brown piece of paper I paper clipped to this page. Well...my mom found it and read it. I am pissed now. It was no big deal. I wish my mom would stay out of my business. For all I know she probably reads my journal too.

First off, for those of you who keep journals, or are thinking of giving your daughters a nice journal for their birthday; yes, parents read journals. Don't feel bad though; it's good parenting. Just don't be surprised to find the most angry, depressing, cynical, and brutally honest words you've ever read. That's what children believe their journals are there for; to write ugly, mean, horrible things about people around them that tick them off on a daily basis.

For you kids who think that your journal is for keeping your deepest and darkest, most intimate moments a secret from the rest of the world; your wrong. It's true that journals are places for you to keep your thoughts and feelings about your daily life, but know that as a general rule of thumb: things in writing are meant to be read. If you do have something truly mean and nasty to say about your family or your bestest friends in the whole wide world, then what you need to learn is poetry. The goal isn't to cut out the angst but to camouflage it and coat it with creative icing. For example, you find yourself in a lunchroom with a bunch of girls who are snickering, giggling and pointing at you; this is what you say to your journal that you now realize might be read by someone other than you some day:

GAGGLED GRAY DISGORGED LUNCH
The rot of my stomach is unbearable within.
Sickening, sobering, stabbing on in.
Gaggling girls sicken me gray.
Annoying the naught of the life that is such as thee.
Grabbing me, shaking me, making me pray
to the many horned god that will take them away.
Wrangle the gaggling, giggling girls all the way.
Untie the knots of the rot of the stomach that bears
the sickening, sobering, stabbing that's there.
Slurping and slopping up food from the mat of the
plate to the table that lay for the fat.
Grumbing, growling and sending it back
would be play for the day that has made it this way.
Sickening, sobering, stabbing me in; for the Gods
of all sakes give them some spoons, or forks, or
knives and some manners, before I'm made to
give it all back.
Already too late for the paper thin platter, that lay
before me with a color uncoded mess that they made;
making me thinner than before I got here this day.

-Excerpt from:
Life's Little Impact! An Incomplete Poetry Journal
by: Patty Timms

From raw feelings, to poetry, to short story, to fiction...get it all out in writing!