OHMYGOD, I was, like, so cool.

Let's play the Read Some Shit from Rosie's Diary game again, shall we? Oh don't groan like that, this is the good juice...from HIGH SCHOOL. The golden years, man.

This particular gem is a little bit diary, an even bigger bit eating journal. I was obsessed with being fat. I wasn't clinically anorexic, per se, and definitely not bulimic, but I had serious, serious issues with body image and even bigger issues with food. I was fucking 17 years old and writing down everything I ate:

May 5, 1993

B-fast: 2 mini bagels - 150 [calories]
Lunch: sunflower seeds - 200
saltines - 150
Dinner: banana - 100
rice cakes- 80

680 calories!

Terrific!

Exercise: 3/4 Cathy Smith Video

Dude! This makes me want to go back and smack some sense into my teenaged ass! On top of this, I was also cheerleading and doing lifeguard training and running like a fool and doing 300 sit-ups a day and still only eating fucking 800 calories, at most! I weighed 110 lbs. at my current height (5'4") and my "goal weight" back then was 100! Hello, Kate Bosworth?!?

(Might I interject a small dose of hilarity and tell you that I was also working as a waitress at Aunt Sarah's Pancake House, home of the All-You-Can-Eat Fried Chicken and Pancake Special? In my journal I repeatedly reprimand myself for eating at work. NO EATING AT WORK, I forbid in my loopy girly (and very neat) handwriting...)

Sadly, I bet high school girls are still doing this. Maybe it's even worse. I know a lot of it has to do with the media (and shows like Laguna Beach, OK?), and an even bigger part has to do with peer pressure. How do we prevent this? Are teenaged girls hard-wired for this kind of nonsense? I had pretty good eating habits imparted to me - my family hardly ever ate fast food, we had no soda or junk food in the house, we grew lots of our own food on the farm we lived on. We didn't even have cable TV, all we got was one station! (Hippies, dude, I tell you!) Clearly I got it somewhere. Probably from all the anorexic UVa sorority sisters prancing around my hometown in their pearls and big hair bows! ha!

Moving on to other Laguna Beach-like behavior, boozing it up was not lost on me in the formative years, no! Not one itty bit. We raged, and forgive me if that sounds a little like pride. It's just, well, let's just say that my freshman year in college I got a 4.0 while all my other classmates were just discovering - shudder - WEED and BOURBON and BEAST LIGHT. I was chugging Beast Light at the age of 13, y'all!

(Mom, I'm kidding, although - read the rest with caution.)

Growing up in a college town (a college where drinking is HUGE, I might add), we weren't content to just sip stolen wine coolers at lame high school parties. No, we would go to UVa football games and participate in "fourth-year fifth" (a tradition where seniors drink a fifth of liquor at the last home game) even though we were fourth year HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS. We would go to horse races and tailgate with the UVa kids and get wasted and barf and pass out, just like them! We'd head down to frat row for parties on Friday nights, and nobody knew or cared how old we were. (We lied, of course, and said we went to Longwood.) We hooked up with frat boys and went to cheesy college bars and professed our great love of all things Dave Matthews...haha.

Anyway. Enough of how cool I was =) My senior year I met a UVa boy I liked very much (not at a frat party, but in da 'hood - or as close as one gets to a hood in Charlottesville). We met at a shady apartment on JPA where one of the cooks from Aunt Sarah's Pancake House lived. My friends and I often went there to drink 40s and smoke blunts and watch fights break out and cops make arrests. Ummm, yes, you could say it was definitely a hangout of the 90210 variety. So wholesome.

The guy's name was Rich (who later became known simply as SlipperLips)and he had come over to "JPA" (as in, "are you going to JPAafter school today?")to make a purchase. An illegal purchase. From there, it was love at under-age girl first sight! I soon became slightly whipped. He had his own place, and was an actor. One night he made sure to show me all the episodes of Law and Order he had been in. I thought he was totally the most, like, awesome thing ever:

January 9, 1994

Okay, here's some luck! Well let me tell you about my weekend 1st. Friday after school we went to Rickey's and he said Will B. wanted to ask me out some time ;) Cool as shit! Then later that night we went to the game, to JPA, my ma's, and then to Rickey's- and I got so fucked up playing chandeliers! I had to drive home- I didn't think I was going to make it! Saturday I worked and Jean came in to see me. Well, the story on that is so fucked up! Sat. he was s'posed to call me at work and didn't. So after work, me, Missy, Patsy, Ash, and Shannon went to Will's and drank and shit. Okay, here's the slammin' part. We got back to Ashley's and 2 secs after we walk in the phone rings! It was Rich! In town for one night. He had Ashley's number from before. So me, Patsy, and Ash snuck out and went over there. I was totally x-cited and trashed at the same time. Then we had to leave and I was so high. But Rich kissed me BYE and stuff although I don't quite remember exactly what he said just that Liz still liked him and stuff. And he wrote on his calendar, but I didn't see it, Rosie call me if you can Melissa is leaving right now, whatever the fuck that shit means! But he's got my # now so he can call me! What a cutie. Jean never called. I'm bummed. What a fucker.

[heart],
Ro

As you can imagine, a UVa guy only wants one thing from a local high school senior. And it has to do with slammin'. I was ultimately crushed. Although, 3 years later I ran into Rich at a Phish show and he tried to reignite the flames... ha ha. And once again, I was all, like, what the hell was I thinking? I tell you though, I wouldn't change a thing about h.s. (except maybe the studying part of it), but I also sure as hell would never go back. It's amazing I'm still alive.