   Geez, normally my spelling wasn't that bad in sixth grade... so what the hell happened in this entry?! Ment. Ressisted. Finnally. Extreemly. And my favorite, my multiple tries at "peninsula": pininsula and pinninsula. For some reason, I had no problem spelling the peninsula's French name "Presque Isle" in the last entry... but the word "peninsula" itself was clearly more challenging. Hmmm.
061 and 062 were the names of the two sixth grade "companies" at my middle school. We had most of our classes with just the kids in our company and the only times we saw people from the other company was at lunch or in classes like gym, music, art, etc.
Maybe you're smart and figured it out from context clues, but the part that got cut off on the second page said that Doug gave me a note to give to Suzy.
It probably made me feel really tall to see that Chris' girlfriend, who was two years older than me, was only a centimeter taller. But really, I was just barely 5 feet tall at the time. I probably wouldn't have been so concerned about my height if I knew then that I'd grow to 5'7" by high school!
   It makes me sad to realize how much Doug must have liked Suzy... while from what I gathered, she didn't like him nearly as much. He wanted to buy necklaces. He had to double-check if Suzy really wanted to hold hands with him. He even said he loved her. Poor guy. Clearly, I wasn't so sympathetic at the time.
I wish I could remember the details of this "math game" that made us all so sweaty. That is so weird. Mmm math and physical exertion... I can't imagine a better combination.
"All Stars" was a chorus made up of the best 5th and 6th grade singers in the district. Both years, I was one of the four kids chosen in my grade. For the Spring Concert, the four of us sang a song together. And supposedly while doing so, Doug looked at me with zombie eyes. I don't understand why I didn't draw his hair accurately though, considering like 90% of my grade school crushes, he too had hair that "went like this". Which also explains why he was able to put my scrunchie in his hair.
Finally, I love that my strategy for getting Doug to hang out with me over the summer was to entice him with the great climbing trees in my backyard. I suppose it worked once before...
In 2nd or 3rd Grade, there was a boy named Brian who I knew through the soccer team I played on at the time. He happened to live in my neighborhood and would wander over to my house every once and awhile to climb our trees. One time, he climbed so high, he got stuck and I remember my mom calling out from the kitchen window, "Do you need help??" Another time, he jammed a stick down a crevice in a tree and an entire colony of ants started pouring out. And you know how I hated ants. But that has nothing to do with anything.
Anyhow, one day after bonding over our mutual love for tree-climbing, Brian invited me to go over to his house. Ooh! I had never been to a boy's house before! So I went. I later got in trouble for leaving without telling my mom. But it wasn't even worth it because once we got Brian's house, he spent what seemed like hours showing me his entire baseball card collection, telling me details of the players, the Beckett prices, etc. Snore. I was so bored.
But point is, Brian voluntarily hung out with me because of my awesome trees and even invited me to his house. If the trees worked with him-- why not try it with Doug? Boys are boys, right?
      I haven't made a list recently and at an impressive 6 pages, this entry definitely needs one.
1. For some reason, that night at Grandma's, we had to sleep on the hardwood dining room floor. I can't remember why we couldn't sleep in the upstairs bedroom. It might have had something to do with the fact that one time when we stayed there previously, Kasey and I pulled a bunch of the "bumps" off the egg crate mattress pad and blamed it on each other. Anyhow, we were sleeping on the floor and that's how the big black carpenter ant so easily crawled in my sleeping bag. I don't know what I was so scared of. I probably imagined waking up completely covered in ants or suffocating from ant inhalation. Yuck.
2. I love how I always wrote that Doug and I were "| | this close". I remember wondering while writing these entries if that was an accurate representation of how far apart we were. I mean, that distance looks pretty small on paper, but when you think about it in real life, Doug and I would be REALLY close. We might as well have been touching. So I'd wonder if we were actually whole inches apart. But then I'd think... even though it might be more accurate when translated to real life, writing "we were | | this close" comes across on paper as a bigger distance than it actually is when translated to real life... and it wastes a lot of paper. So I decided to stick with "| |" because accurate or inaccurate, it gets the point across.
3. I asked Suzy to break up with Doug? Doesn't that violate some kind of girl code? You're not supposed to like or date a friend's ex, let alone a friend's current boyfriend! In my defense though, I did like him first. Ha. So there. No but really, can you imagine crushing on your friend's b/f now and being like, "Hey, do you think you could dump your man? I'd like to date him. Thanks." Yeah, that'd go over well...
4. "He said he didn't like me a while ago, like Wednesday." In sixth grade, apparently a "while" was 3 days.
5. Dammit. I started liking Doug again. Honestly, had I ever really stopped?
  In regard to those nicknames... we've already covered Supergirl. The second one got cut off but it says "Bertha Winterbottom". I can't remember where the names came from but for a month or two, I was "Bertha Winterbottom" and my friend Lianna was my husband "George Winterbottom". Also, my friend Lindsay was "Yin" and I was "Yang".
We probably only used these names when writing notes to each other in school... but I wouldn't really learn how important it was to use nicknames in notes until 7th grade. I wrote a note to my friend Leah which included a clever poem making fun of the shop teacher. The only part I can remember was something about him waddling like a duck. Well, I neglected to use code names in the note... and that normally wouldn't have been such a big deal... if Leah hadn't accidentally dropped the note and if the assistant principal hadn't picked it up.
This was the same assistant principal who I mentioned earlier perfectly fit the role of the Wicked Witch in the school play. Can you believe she gave me a Saturday detention for that silly poem? I guess it must have said something a little more offensive than simply critiquing the shop teacher's gait... but I always felt that Saturday detention was too severe of a punishment. The assistant principal should have been supportive of my extra-curricular interest in poetry!
The girl who sat next to me in detention was there for writing a poem too... except she said hers was for an assignment and that the teacher thought it had inappropriate "sexual content". Sexual poetry?!? In seventh grade?
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Dude. Trust me. I didn't like Doug. Really. I just pulled out my pink and yellow markers for fun and coincidentally happened to have colored over his name and only his name. I was probably going to color everyone else's names too but I forgot, or got busy, or got called down for dinner or something. But yeah, it's not what it looks like. It doesn't mean anything that Doug's name is highlighted and- wait a sec- it also looks like I may have changed to black ink for his name... and it looks bold... but trust me, it's not like I was tracing his name over and over again in cursive while daydreaming about our future wedding or what we'd name our children or anything. Haha... we were just friends. I didn't like Doug like that.
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