Delicious Cringe Part 2

My old diaries continue to provide me with amusement and awful, squirmy feelings of abject humiliation. It's a nice trade-off.

Zoraida's comment on my last post inspired me to share this latest discovery: When I was about 10, every few weeks I would write up a list of "Friend Evaluations" in my journal. They can best be described as profanity and exclamation point laden tirades. This is my favorite (names changed to protect the unfairly vilified):

Micah: Sweet, Hyper, Cute!!!!! I love his spiked hair!!

Owen: Jerk

Ryan: Jerk

Aimee: Sweet, considerate, know-it-all

Jenna: Disloyal, untrustworthy, wining (sic), coniving (sic), manipulative, snobby, rude, ostentatios (sic, oh the irony), inconsiderate, lying, arrogant b*tch!!!!!

Carrie: The same but a touch nicer.

Also, at one point, I refer to a girl as the "Slut of the Century." We were ten.

The funniest/most awful part of these entries isn't just that I felt comfortable passing such harsh judgment on all those around me (which, honestly, hasn't much changed), but how wildly my opinions vacillated. One week, Jenna was an Ostentatios(TM) monster and the next week she was "Awesome! The sweetest!! True friend!!"

But… that was kind of the reality of grade school. I remember my friends and I triangulating constantly, forming and dissolving alliances within our tribe. We were vicious and fickle and often, almost hysterically joyful. We once got kicked out of a movie theater for CRYING too loudly. If you said we were silly and cruel, you'd be right. But we were also glittery little maenads, drunk on scented lip balm, snapping with ferocity. We were that elusive "girl power" in its purest, most unstable form, ready to spit charged particles and change without warning. We should have been more kind. We should have been more cautious. But I guess this is where I shrug and say, "We were free."

(Also, I encourage you to click on the pic because that is, in fact, a painting by Finch of Strawberry Shortcake, riding My Little Pony, after killing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and the details are not to be missed.)