It’s 8 o’clock, do you know where your emotions are?

If you had been at Sarah Brown’s “Cringe” night last night, you would have heard poems that ended with lines like that (sorry Aaron), and all manner of hysterically hideous 14 year-old rants written by perfectly well-adjusted adults who actually still have their high school diaries. I was totally bummed that I never bothered to keep detailed accounts of my more dramatic adolescent experiences, or even the mundane ones, which were actually funnier. But I’m thinking that between the signatures in all my high school yearbooks and clippings from my stint on USA Today‘s “Teen Panel,” I may be able to put together a reading for next time.

A highlight was that one of the readers was Blaise K., better known as Bazima, whom I worked with during the summer of 1997 and hadn’t seen in years, and who also, unlike 99.9% of bloggers who delusionally think this might actually happen to them, is an actual person with a blog that is actually so popular that a publisher actually commissioned her to write an actual book based on it.

Other winners were a girl’s transcribed phone call with her 6th grade boyfriend, a guy’s poem about being a high school theater stagehand called “Unsung,” and Sarah B.’s list of “what songs I slow-danced to and with who (sic)” Given how hard it was for me to type that sentence, I empathize with Sarah who has managed to fight against the overwhelming urge to defile her historic middle school archive by adding an “m”.