Teen Diaries |The Camp Blue Bay Diary Entries of 1985

Take note of my lovely ET sheets. I still have them.

Upon visiting my mom, I stumbled upon a red journal filled with entries from my week at Girl Scout sleepaway summer camp in East Hampton's Camp Blue Bay.

Summer of 1985 I was 12.5 years old. I loved The Goonies, Cyndi Lauper, makeup, gummy bracelets, friendship pins and Huey Lewis & The News.  Looking back, summer sleepaway camp sort of prepped us for college dorm life. I love how I documented everything I ate! Such a chubber!  I'll admit, these diaries are queer and boring. My comments are in parentheses.

FIRST DAY!  Tuesday, August 13, 1985
Today I re-met Nikki from last year. I met two new really nice girls, Lisa and Diana. I just set everything up, it looks neat. I wrote 2 letters so far. One to my friend Serena and another to Mom. I took the swim test. I ate a mayo and lettuce sandwich for lunch (ew?) OK, time for dinner.

I'm back and ready to write. I'm also alone. I have bad windburn on my cheeks. It's now 8pm and getting dark. I wonder where everyone is. I mailed my letters. The other girls are starting a camp fire. I'm gonna write Danny a letter (Danny was my platonic male best friend). 


It's now 9:21pm and we made smores. Dee is reading her bible and I'm laying on my bed holding a flashlight. I love Sean Astin. Good night.

Posing in front of our "lean-to" showing off my Tommy Howell pin-up.

Wednesday August 14,1985
So far I ate bread and butter for breakfast. We went on the BMX bike trail. It sort of stinks. My hair is very wet. I put my head under the hose. It's break time now. 


Tommy Howell is hanging on the post in our tent. He's not that bad, kind of cute. I wish I didn't have to go swimming. I hate the gross rocks and smelly salt water. I'm hungry. I hope we have a good lunch. I skipped two meals so far because I didn't like the menu choices. I can't wait to go home and swim in our pool. Summer's almost over, only two more weeks to go. I'm so depressed. I wanna go home so bad. (This is funny, I thought I loved camp!)


I love Sean Astin.

Nikki really hates me, but that's okay because I hate her more.  I might move in with Kristen, Athena and Nicole. I can't stand it here in the tent with Nikki and Dee. They're always fighting with me. I'm friends with everyone at camp except Nikki and Dee. Lisa is nice though.


For lunch I ate 2 tacos. I found out I can't move in with my pals in Tent 6. Nikki and I are trying to get along now. We all had a water fight before, it was fun. I bought a really gnarly tote bag (ha ha, gnarly!) and Collette, a counselor from Belgium thought my name began with an "E" and wrote "Ellyson" on my bag. I don't really care though. 


Tabatha and Laura are fighting. I'm sitting in the kitchen, it's 8:24. I'm dying to go home. I hate bugs so bad, especially Daddy Long Legs. (I still hate bugs!)

Thursday August 15, 1985
I ate 2 boxes of Sugar Pops (remember when they weren't called "Corn Pops"!) for breakfast. Nikki's singing and we're alone in the tent. I can't wait to go home! I'm not having as much fun as last year. A lot of the kids are flaky this year. I'm very hot and tired and wish I didn't have to go boating. (I was never an outdoorsy person, I forgot even as a kid I hated doing things outdoors!)


It's break now. We had to clean the bathrooms. We ate pizza bagels for lunch. We played line basketball and killer for 2 hours. I went rowing for a while. I hate swimming. I don't like Andi that much and don't think she should be a counselor, she's not that nice. I can't wait to go home tomorrow! We have lazy day, we get to sleep til 9am! I love Sean Astin. I miss Mom. I wrote Mom, Joe (brother), Serena and Danny. They made us write to our family again today. 


We had a big talent show.  I wanted to do a lip sync. We looked so dumb. I ate potatoes for supper.

Stay tuned for Part II of the exiting and dramatic Camp Diaries. Did you go to camp? Did you keep a diary while at camp?

Unfriended on Facebook? Unfollowed on Twitter or Blogger?

This weekend I spent all of Saturday afternoon helping two former classmates plan our 20th high school reunion. While hitting up our high school contacts on Facebook via Blackberry and laptop, we made a horrifying discovery. Wouldn't you know it, a bit of "unfriending" had gone down over the past few months. We took a few moments to digest the devastating situation and did our best to cheer each other up. A year ago, I blogged about being deleted from Facebook and/or unfollowed on Blogger, and the experience is still the same.

It hurts. I won't pretend to deny it. Being unfriended (remember, it was word of the year in 2009!) has a way of bringing back feelings of being ousted from the cool kids lunch table at school. It makes you wonder if you said something offensive or "liked" something uncool. What exactly was it that turned off the receptionist from your old job or your kindergarten crush?

Perhaps this particular person was sick of seeing your Farmville updates and didn't know they could simply hide the game. It's true! There are Facebookers who have yet to figure out how to add photos or hide people's status updates. If that's the case, someone needs to teach these Facebook folk to hate the game not the player. I'm not into those games and was psyched to hide the games!

Then there's Twitter. One day you're riding high with 706 followers, the next you're down to 704. What happened? Who unfollowed? Was it a bot or two? Was it someone who simply deleted their Twitter account? Did you tweet a few too many times poolside bragging about your lavish Bora Bora trip? One will never know. Twitter interaction obviously isn't as personal as Facebook. You haven't bonded with someone's family through their 500 photo albums and kept up with their routine through comments and status updates. I guarantee the feeling of loss isn't as deep with the tweeter as it is with the Facebook unfriender.

When it comes to the act of unfollowing, bloggers might agree that is one of the cruelest forms of being "dissed and dismissed." Most of us follow hundreds of blogs. The Blogger dashboard allows you to hide any blog you want (similar to Facebook's hide functionality) without letting them know. No need to unfollow! If you really don't want to see a blogger's blog in your reader, just "Hide from List" -- it's easy and painless for your fellow blogger. Think about it, what if you finally reached 300 followers and that one person brought you back down to 299? Ouch, right?

Just know in your heart if someone unfriended you today on Facebook or stopped following you on Twitter or Blogger, it's okay to grieve the loss. We've all been there and your feelings are valid. Yes, you will get over it, unless of course it's a close friend or family member. In that case, I suggest stop questioning yourself and go directly to the source. Call them out on such uncool social networking etiquette and just squash it! (To you younger kids, that was '90s slang for make-up and be chill.)

Thanks for reading and feel free to share your personal experience with being unfriended or unfollowed.

UPDATE: IN RESPONSE TO YOUR SWEET COMMENTS, I SWEAR I WASN'T RECENTLY "UNFRIENDED" OR "UNFOLLOWED." SOME FRIENDS WERE DISCUSSING IT THIS WEEKEND AND I FELT COMPELLED TO REVISIT THE TOPIC. I'M NOT HURTING, I SWEAR. :-)

The Geraldo Rivera Internship at CBS

In the 1990s, talk shows dominated a majority of the television stations during the afternoon. Dramatically trashy stories about messy divorces, cheating spouses, squaters, hookers, DNA testing for promiscuous moms and dads were much more popular than they are today. Today the court shows seem to have taken their place, combining relationship and family drama with a courtroom backdrop.

In my senior year of college, I decided that I wanted to become a talk show host. My major was Communications with a concentration in Public Relations, however in order to graduate I needed to spend 125 hours interning. I secured a television internship with Geraldo at CBS Broadcast Plaza in the Columbus Circle section of Manhattan. The focus that season was the O.J. Simpson trial and murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. It was such an awful story. I felt horrible escorting family members to the green room and offering them Snapples and gourmet sandwiches.

Yes, it was exciting. No, I never really did anything with it. Looking back now, I should have kept my public relations focus. I do recall sending dozens of letters to the big PR agencies in New York City; none of them replied. I wasn't the right fit for television production at that time. Everyone had these obnoxious attitudes and fake tans. They sucked down a steady diet of nothing but Diet Cokes and cigarettes.

Producers would ask us broke-ass interns to pick up scripts and items they left at home, clean out the fridge and buy $6 cartons of milk at the CBS deli. Our weekly compensation was a $5 metro card which didn't cover a roundtrip subway ride to the studio. Ricki Lake paid for her interns entire commute. I opted for Geraldo thinking CBS was better than UPN-9. I also thought that Ricki was a newer celebrity whereas the legendary Geraldo Rivera had been in the biz for 20 years by that point.

During a visit to my mom's house, I discovered my old internship journal and wow was it an interesting read. Detailed entries about each day and the variety of tasks involved and people I encountered. I completely forgot it all. One of my favorite, yet simplistic tasks was going through viewer mail -- I enjoyed this while at Tiger Beat, SuperTeen and Metal Edge magazine as well.

My journal revealed my reaction to letters written to Geraldo. I remembered a letter from a woman who had burned her scalp with hair dye and the disgusting photos of her follicle frustrations. Letters from viewers begging Geraldo to find Jesus or God. Some letters included cheap, odd little trinkets. I would separate out letters that asked for help finding lost relatives or loves -- those viewers received a form letter from a sponsor that paid the show to advertise their "Find Lost Love" search service.

One letter I included in my journal was from a woman in DC. Her son was shot to death while working at a Washington, DC McDonald's. The letter brought me to tears. His mom said, "I said goodbye to my baby for the last time this morning. He never came home." I yanked that letter and put it in the "Story Idea" pile. I'm not sure whatever happened to it, but I wished I could personally visit the mom in DC and give her a big hug and tell her it would be okay. She described that he was a good boy, -- never in trouble. He was in vocational school and only worked at McDonald's for ten hours a week to earn money for their family.

I realized that day I was too emotional to pursue a true journalism or television. Who knows? Maybe this would have been an asset. We've all seen Barbara Walters and Oprah cry. That would definitely be me had I been given the chance to host my own show. Oh, and that mother from DC? She would be the first guest I'd book. I'd put her up in only the finest of hotels, have dinner with her and offer to set up a scholarship in her son's name.

Popular Geraldo episode featuring club kids.