My 1992 Diary by Dawn Luebbe
My rating: 3/5 cats
i picked this up because of “warning signs,” that allie brosh story where she finds a letter she wrote to her future self when she was ten years old and analyzes it as an adult. it is something that makes me cry with laughter every single time i read it and half of the time i just think about it. so i figured a UCB alum would be even funnier at this sort of thing, with an even bigger treasure trove of juvenilia from which to draw.
alas.
it’s not that it’s not funny; i did laugh but i never once felt like crying or peeing. which i guess makes me a full-grown adult, but where’s the fun in that? this woman is a bit younger than me, so her pop culture references are things i sort of know about, but weren’t part of my own childhood experiences/preoccupations. 90210, c & c music factory, marky mark, z cavaricci’s—these are things i know about in a vague way just by being a citizen of the world, but i never watched/listened to/wore any of these things.
nonetheless, this is a charmingly enthusiastic series of diary entries, where exclamation marks decorate every poorly-spelled sentence (including seven exclamation points after the sentence “lunch was fine.”), and doodles in the capital-d of her signature indicate her mood at the time of writing. her major concerns revolve around her hair, junk food, troll dolls, wrestling, boys, preventing her brother from reading her diary, and an archivist’s devotion to documenting her sister ginger’s schedule. to the extent that the adult dawn proposes a drinking game based on how many times she talks about ginger’s schedule:
Also, if you’re still playing the Ginger’s-schedule drinking game, congratulations! You’re now an alcoholic.
i did enjoy the way she would frequently use the p.s. portion of her entries to quote song lyrics (be they from tunes popular at the time or her own original rap lyrics) such as this one
P.S.—can’t touch this.
or even better, her misconstruing the lyrics to a song in a scandalous way
P.S.—do it in the butt all night long.
fantastic, and a worthy addendum to her own thoughts.
a typical entry:
Jan. 11, 1990. Thursday
Today for breakfast I had a muffin. I also had orange juise. At reading we had a test. At math we got to eat an orange. I was fun. For lunch I had a chicken paddie and French Fri’s and milk. After school I went to dance. We found out what our recidle song. It was going to be pink cadalack. That was one of my favoite songs. for supper we had spegetti. It was very good.
Dawn
or:
Jan. 6, 1990. Saturday.
Today for breakfast I had pancakes I only had 1/2 pancakes. Because I don’t really like pancakes that much. Then I got drested. Then I watched DIsney. After that Ellie came. We went outside and threw snowballs at the cows. We called the uglyest ones name moose. We put snow in grandma and grandpa’s mailbox. For lunch we had nudle’s. And after that I watched T.V. for supper we had hot dogs and chips. Then we went to a basket ball game Nebraska won. Then score was 91 to 99. It was very very very fun.
Dawn
you can see why she wanted to keep her brother away from these state secrets.
so, as a time capsule, it is a wonderful window into lincoln, nebraska c. 1992, where bang-height was the surest way to win popularity, and a teenage girl could declare “i want to die” over a mother’s refusal to allow a new hairstyle without a therapist being called.
i enjoyed her nostalgic journey through her past, looking back with more sophisticated knowledge on her early navigation of the rocky shores of sexuality
I must confess, I didn’t know much about the subject, so I felt compelled to turn to my role models, Salt-N-Pepa. From their music video for “Let’s Talk About Sex,” I learned that sex involved dancing in overalls and color-blocked mock turtlenecks. No wonder my interest was piqued.
and love
…despite my references to Dan as my boyfriend, I can say with absolute certainty that this was wishful thinking, unless you take “boyfriend” to mean “someone who occasionally sits in the same classroom as you because he is required to.”
and it takes real balls to share your 13-year-old poetry, inspired by the death of kurt cobain. (or, here, “kirk kobane”). also thumbs-up must be given for mentions of mc dlt’s and watcher in the woods.
so, not as rip-roaringly funny as allie brosh, but little in this world is. those of you with more personal connection to the time and age will likely giggle/relate/squirm more than old crusty karen.
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