Shit That Happened to Me in 7th Grade: Everything I Know About Girls 1998

Before I get going on this hilarious post, I’d just like to show you the cover of my most prized possession:

When archaeologists unearth this journal from some dig a thousand years from now, the argument that “Green Day Rules” is blatantly scrawled out on the grocery bag cover (damn parents couldn’t even buy me a composition book, jeez!) should put to rest any debate on the authentication of this artifact. In addition, the 8-ball drawn on the top left-hand corner actually does a better job of tracing the journal back to 1995 A.D. than carbon-dating ever could.

I don’t know why people thought 8-Balls were so cool during middle school. At first I thought Zak and I were the only ones that thought they were cool but Joey later confirmed for me that 8-Balls were revered by everyone at that time. All I know is that when I first dusted off my journal after remaining hidden for so many years to write this piece, I actually found a bunch of 8-Ball POGS in between the pages. Sweet!

But enough about 8-Ball POGS, let’s delve into what exactly I knew about women around February 4, 1998:


Wow, I was pretty wise back then! A lot of that stuff still holds up today. The one thing I would definitely change though is that first piece of knowledge about upper classmen because I was an upper classmen for five years (God bless that bonus Senior year of college!) on two non-consecutive occasions and that never really panned out for me in the girlfriend department.

I deliberately left in that top section about the Wollin Beatdowns. The whole Wollin Beatdown thing was a dark, dark, very dark period of my past where my posse of friends would commit random acts of assault upon me. Someone would yell, “ Wollin Beatdown!” at some random time when we were all hanging out and then everyone would stop whatever they would doing and proceed to tackle me and inflict various forms of pain, most commonly punches to the back, shoulders, and kidneys while I was in the fetal position. It was kind of like when someone said the word of the day on Pee Wee’s Playhouse but with more atomic wedgies.

Don’t you love the oxymoronic-ness of me claiming I know these “facts” about girls, yet I also claim that they don’t make any sense to me, thus negating all those little bits of sage wisdom in the first place?

Well, I think from this journal entry that it is clear that I knew a thing or two about the subtle nuances of the opposite sex back in high school. Well, that’s not entirely true…

Yeah, so that’s an equation that I wrote about three weeks later on what it would take for me to go out with Tricia, the girl that I liked at the time.

Incidentally, what is the passage of time that needs to elapse before it’s appropriate to talk about old crushes on the World Wide Web? 10 years? 9 Years? 8 Years, 8 Months, and 12 Days? I would like to provide an equal opportunity to embarrass ALL the girls I ever liked in Middle School and High School (how progressive of me!) but to play it safe, I’ll keep my posts limited to the girls I liked before Junior year.

Back to the equation, I guess I also thought that being tan and freckleless was another important factor to pick up chicks. I sure was a confused lad back then.

It’s kind of funny, the crush I had on Tricia back when I was a Freshmen was completely hopeless, but towards Senior year, we actually got to be pretty good friends and she even picked me to be her partner for our Senior Homecoming Pep Rally skit/dance thingy. If I could go back in time and tell myself that something like that was going to happen to me two years down the road, I probably would have called my future self a dirty rotten liar and then would have attempted to kick my own ass.

This would probably be very embarrassing for the both us, since I didn’t know how to fight back then and I certainly don’t know how to fight right now. But after exhausting ourselves from all the arm flailing, I would smooth things over by reminding me that life would get a lot better from here on out.

Then I would give myself a Sports Almanac from today, in the hopes of creating an alternate 2006 where I am a shady industrialist and the kingpin of a vast gambling empire.

Hey, if it worked for Biff, it could work for me!


Now that I think about it, I would easily trade in my future as a casino tycoon to own a flying DeLorean. It doesn't even need time-traveling capabilities. Ooh, yeah, I want a hoverboard, too.