Journal Assignment - Feb. 8, 1984

Its been a long time since I've written to you and a long time since you've taken this up to read. I am an alien mutant. Not really, I'm a spy from another planet. You may have heard of it, Venus. I am here to prove that there is no intelligent life on earth. I haven't been able to prove it here in Texas yet but my report about Washington D.C. is promising. When the other spys and I collect enough data, we will attack and envage the Earth! Venician for ever. Peace - granola.


Eighth grade must have been pretty boring to me. I can see from just flipping through this journal that many of the things I wrote were out of boredom, just to entertain myself. Mrs. Biggs, my 8th grade English teacher was phenomenal. Everyone had said she was the toughest in the Junior High, and that she could be really mean, but I never saw that. Many of these journal entries are written directly to her. She was smart, I remember that, and she was really interested in us doing our best work, never content with any of us slacking off and just passing through. Toward the end of the Spring, she stopped coming to classes, and we were told she was very ill. She came in about once a week, to check on us and let us know she was still reading our work, so there was no room for laziness. Then she stopped coming, and my parents let me know that she was dying of cancer. I did get to see her once more, at a restaurant with her family. She was quite frail and I hugged her and told her I loved her. She died that Summer. I don't think of her all that often, what with being involved in my own family and such, but she was ONE on that handful list of teachers who really knew what they were doing. She really liked my "Peace - Granola" sign-off, and even started using "Granola" as a nickname for me - which I LOVED, given the extraordinary lack of hippiness in Midland, Texas in the 1980s! Oh, and I STILL always always always feel like an alien... which is a good thing, as my children are definitely aliens as well!