WITH THE RELEASE of the movie version of Bridget Jones's Diary, I thought I'd go back and read some of my old diaries, which I have been dutifully keeping since I was about 14 years old. I have a box full of these carefully written tomes, which come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. The box weighs a ton, yet I have lovingly lugged it along with me to every place I've lived, including back and forth across the country twice. Fortunately, the advent of technology has allowed me to keep a digital, and therefore much lighter, diary for the past few years.

I'm not entirely sure why I hold on to these youthful diaries, or why I continue to keep one to this day. One possible reason is pragmatic: I have no long- or short-term memory to speak of, so diaries are a good way to keep track of how I've spent my life. Aside from that, I knew that when the time was right, I would sit down and browse through the yellowed pages of those diaries, taking in the years, laughing at how naive I was way back when, and contemplating the many ways I'd changed for the better. I'd ponder how much I'd matured, and consider all the things I'd learned from my vast experience. (And then I'd note with pride how much my writing had improved.) I would sip wine by the fireplace and think to myself how far I'd come, and yet how far I still had to go.

By now you've probably figured out that that's not exactly how it went.

I SAT down with my wine and flipped open the first book. I stumbled quickly upon this passage from September 1980: " The kid I thought liked me has a terrible reputation. M. went out with him and she said he told everyone that she slept with him and all that crap. The other kid I thought was cute has a steady girlfriend. "

Hmm. Familiar theme, I thought to myself, chuckling at my precocious concern for a boy's reputation way back then. I picked up a diary from 1983 and paged to August: " He said it wasn't that he wasn't attracted to me, but he had just gotten out of a relationship and he felt kind of numb about going back into one. But I think that's just an excuse. I bet he's not attracted to me cause I'm not thin like his old girlfriend. She was a rail. "

A cold chill began to settle in the base of my spin. I paged forward ... way forward ... looking for some signs of improvement. But the diaries do not lie, even when I want them to. A scant 10 years later, I wrote: " Got home from my date with G. on Monday and called Beth. I asked her to tell me something terrible about him, like that he had 11 illegitimate children and was getting married next month, so I could stop thinking about him. She said he had been seeing a woman in Boston for awhile, but didn't know how serious it was. " A line later: " Must stay committed to the work-out plan. Only 10 lbs to go! "

The killing blow was an entry from last summer: " ... on Thursday night, he admitted that he'd just gotten out of a big relationship, and wasn't ready to jump right back into one. " Two lines later: " Trying the Atkins diet this month. B. had good success with it. "

I threw the diaries back in their box and slid the box into the deepest, darkest, most inaccessible cranny in the back of my office where it would be very, very difficult for me or anyone else to chance upon it. Jesus, I thought to myself. I haven't changed a bit. Twenty years later, and I'm still chasing the Homo sapiens unobtainium and vowing to shed the last 10 pounds (which, in a random review of the past 20 years of entries, I have vowed to shed no fewer than 210 times ... and did so again last week). I mean, even Bridget eventually learns her lesson.

I KNOW what you're thinking. You think that these are the classic symptoms of someone suffering from little or no self-confidence. That's not the case. The fact is that I do need to lose 10 pounds. I have also met and dated lots of intelligent, handsome men, many of whom were freshly, painfully, or committedly single, or who were involved with a woman whom they failed to mention until our fifth date. As any woman can tell you, that description applies to about 98 percent of the single male population. It's not like I'm going out of my way to find this shit.

Still, there's no avoiding the pattern, and I blame it, as I do most of my foibles, on the memory thing. I keep getting into the same situations, and making the same promises to myself, over and over again, because I keep forgetting why they didn't work out the last time. I also suffer from too much self-confidence: I have an unfailing belief in my ability to make things turn out the way I want them to and am genuinely surprised when they instead keep turning out the way they always turn out. To recap: too much self-confidence and a bad memory equals recurring patterns of destructive behavior, painfully documented in real time, in my own handwriting.

But now that I've seen the cold, hard facts, it's time to face the reality that is my life. The laws of probability suggest that the next handsome, unattainable danger boy with a girlfriend who comes into my life is probably not my soul mate. I will probably go to my grave carrying the last 10 pounds. And no matter how hard I try, I will probably never, ever be a better writer than I was on the day I wrote " and all that crap. "

Kris Frieswick can be reached at krisf1@gte.net.

Issue Date: April 26-May 3, 2001