Boring Diary Entries and Good Ol Grandpa

Ok, so I had a lot of time on my hands today. No really, I spent a vast ammount of time just sitting around being totally lazy and useless. I didn’t even get dressed until almost 1:00. Can you guess what I spent my day doing? Well, I spent a big part trying to figure out how to spice up my diary menu, which as you saw I finally figured out how to do. I also spent a good deal of time visiting random diaries.

In my little trip down the halls of OD I noticed something that shouldn’t have really surprised me, but it did. No, I’m not talking about the fact that it seems that 90% of the diaries belong to girls age 15 or 16, which makes me feel like I’m sneaking around the Babysitter’s Club. I’m talking about the fact that SO many people seem to totally forget about the creative hemispheres of their brain when writting diary entries. I don’t wanna be mean, and I suppose people can write whatever they want in their diaries (hence the term THEIR diaries), but so many entries sound like monotone stock reports or something…boring.

This is my take on the whole diary situation. If this was just a diary where people write things only for themselves (and the longest I’ve ever been able to stay interested in those types of diaries has been about a week. I actually wrote for seven straight days when I was 15), then I wouldn’t see anything wrong with making every entry a simple list of the day’s events. But this isn’t that type of diary. This is an OPEN diary (yes, I know I’m a great master of the obvious). These diaries are out here for other people to read. I highly doubt that most people who peruse these diaries do so because they just love to see list after list of events in people’s lives…they want (even though it may be an unconscious desire) to be entertained.

With that being said, this is what I’m going to try to do; I am going to try and keep my diary interesting. Now that doesn’t mean this is gonna be J’s comedy page, or that every entry is going to be dark and suicidal, or anything like that. It just means I’ll try to keep it entertaining and interesting, and if I do list my day’s event’s I’ll try to do something to make the list a bit more palletable.

I did a little more Christmas shopping today. I had to get a present for my dad too, cause his birthday is next Friday. I ended up getting him this 5 disc set of five different Imax films about outer space. My dad has always been into space and astronomy and stuff. When he was in high school he built himself a six foot long telescope that we still have. Ever since I was a kid we’ll occassionally take it out and just stare out at stuff. You can see all sorts of stuff on the moon, the rings of Saturn, the storm of Jupiter, even the spiraling arms of the Andromeda Galaxy. Those are usually good times. Just staring up at eternal nothingness kinda has a way of making me forget all the other crap that is what composes life.

After my dad built his telescope though he needed to have something to store it in, so he built this big, wooden crate for it. Now I highly doubt he intentionally made it this way, but the thing looks like a freakin coffin. Not one of those nice fancy ones with the handles, inlaid gold designs, and a port-a-potty for the occupant. This thing looks like one of those plain wood coffins like everyone who dies in an old west movie gets burried in.

I don’t think there was a single friend I had as a kid who didn’t get wide-eyed and ask me what the “coffin” was when we’d go in my garage to get a baseball or something. Being the teensy jokester I was, I always told them it was my grandpa. I told them that he wanted to be burried next to my grandma, but that she was still alive and didn’t know where she wanted to be burried….so we kept him in the garage until grandma made up her mind.

Now of course none of them believed me at first, so I’d tell them to go ahead and look. And then they’d start to second guess their doubts and then usually they’d say, “No, you open it.” And I’d just say, “He’s been dead for over a year. Do you know how bad he smells?” And I’d tell them again to go ahead and open it as I backed away a bit more.

No one ever had the balls to open that thing until after I that I had let them think that my dead grandpa was really in there for a good ammount of time. Of course when I finally did tell them that I just yanked their chain for an hour they were almost always a bit pissed, but it was SO worth it.

I’m getting tired of writting this entry though, so I’m ckecking out for now.

“I’d drink enough of anything to make this world look new again.” The Gin Blossoms