I started reading Pamie.com in high school. It was one of the first online journals I ever followed (back in the dark days of 2003). While the others that I discovered at the time (Velcrometer, Tomato Nation) have fallen off my radar, I still follow everything Pamie writes with a religious fervor.
While I, of course, love her fiction, I’ve always like her true stories best. She has mentioned countless times in her blog how she used to write incredibly long letters to boys, letters filling up notebook after notebook. My friends and I used to do the same thing — we had an official notebook (which I still have) full out our dorky nicknames for each other and breathless descriptions of boys. My best friend and I used to write long, long letters to each other over breaks — page after page of different colored marker and drawings of cat faces and anime. I still have some of those, as well, so she better not piss me off =)
So when I heard that Pamie planned to publish some of her writing to boys, in addition to her various diaries and poems (oh, the poems!), I was thrilled. She has a fantastic sense of humor about her younger self (dubbed “LP” for “Little Pam”) — a wonderful combination of gentle laughter and honest concern for the confused teenager who thought that pouring out her heart and soul to a boy in a 200 page long letter might lead to the kind of romance that she thought she wanted.
The book was even better than I expected. Because it’s not just funny (although it was very, very funny) but because I’m so glad I’m not the only fifteen year old to have absolutely no idea what the hell she was doing. Pamie writes about boys that she fell completely and totally in love with, boys that she pined over and cried over while never knowing a damn thing about them. Never having talked to them. I totally did that. When I was in junior high, I convinced myself I loved a boy in one of my AP classes. I had known this boy for years, but probably never spoke more than five words to him. I pined, and dreamed, and wrote about him (but never TO him, thank god) and generally behaved in the way that I thought love-struck girls should behave. He eventually heard about this from a friend, and was so sweet as to let me down gently, even though I’d never actually said a damn thing to him. Such was the power of my pining. I blame an excess of reading for all of this, by the way. Way too many books. I created a scenario of teen love, played my part and plugged him into the role of “the boy”, even though he was an actual person and not a character in a story.
When it came to boys who actually liked me, however, I friend zoned them reflexively, afraid of the personalities actual boys and preferring those I created personalities for in my head. Similar to a boy that Pamie apologizes to about thirty times in the book. I shut down so many nice boys. It’s a wonder I’m married, honestly.
So thank you, Pamie, for letting me know I was not the only one. It’s been 13 years, and I still flush with embarrassment when I think about that boy from my humanities class (and he’s not the only one I created such an elaborate fantasy about, sadly). Thank you for helping me forgive little Badkittyuno for the truly stupid things she did as a hormonal teenager, and thank you for letting me have a laugh at Little Pam, who I totally want to hug and reassure that eventually, it gets “mostly better”.