Dear Diary, Nothing Happened Today.

Love, Lisa.

I kept all my diaries from my childhood. I just couldn't throw them out. They're in a box somewhere in Arizona in my brother's garage. I especially wanted to keep the one that my brother infiltrated. He left little scraggly comments at the bottom of those lined pages. Somehow he must have found my little brass key and unlocked the flap on my purple Barbie journal. Then, with the delirium tremens of an old man, he shook a sentence out here and there onto the page. If I had written, "I love my bird." He would write, "But the bird hates you."

I can just see his face and hear his evil chuckle. It makes me smile to think of it. He was a bugger. But for some reason, he messed with my older sister more than he messed with me. She was more sensitive, I think. She reacted more to him than I did. Except when we were playing a game. With each Monopoly step backwards that I took, or every time I went to jail, he laughed villainously and sang over and over and over again, "Lisa is LOSING! Losing, losing, LOSING! Heh heh heh heh heh heh!" Just conjure up Cartman, and you'll have the correct tone. I didn't like that AT ALL.

My brother's hands are still shaking. Forty years later. I don't know why. He doesn't even drink. He just shakes. And he's a house painter who doesn't tape things off. He just pushes his shakiness into the brush handle and lets the shakes move the brush. He paints perfectly straight lines on not-so-straight walls. He painted my condo in Arizona with all those bright Mexican colors: purple, yellow, orange. He was really proud of that paint job and I loved living like that, surrounded by color. I'll always remember when we went to Home Depot to pick out my paint and I picked out a bright, New York Taxi Cab Yellow for most of my walls. When we stepped up to the counter, I told the paint mixer guy what, and how much of it, I wanted. He looked at me and said, "NO! That's too much! You can't paint that much with that color. It's too much."

My brother looked at me and we both went, "Heh heh." And he said to the guy, in his best Philly accent, "Yes we kyan!"

Then, when my fricken condo didn't sell, and I'd been through a gaggle of mid-western divorcee real estate agents who insisted that all my walls had to be egg shell white, my brother flew back out to Arizona from Philly and painted away all that color so that all the people who say, "NO! That's too much!" got to win the War On Maintaining Mediocrity. Fuckers.

That's OK, my house still hasn't fucking sold, even with the boring ass walls. We showed them now, din't we.

I guess the reason I wrote this post is because:

• I haven't written anything in a while, and I don't want to let myself get away with losing myself and
• I found this hilarious and charming website called Get Mortified, where adults get up on stage and read their childhood diaries out loud.

I laughed and laughed, and I want you to laugh too. (If you're reading this post in an email, click through to my blog to watch the video. You won't regret it. I swar.)
// The Mortified Shoebox Show //


Dear Diary, Nothing happened today. But, one thing I know for sure, is that my bird loves me. So does my cat. So does my stinky brother. Love, Lisa.