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There's no chance I'm gonna get stuck watching over some great grandkid I hardly even knew. The only thing that will make it fun is if I have the power to punish my descendants whenever they do something annoying.

我可不想被困在照顾一个我几乎不认识的曾孙身上。 唯一能让它变得有趣的是，如果我有能力惩罚我的后代，无论他们什么时候做了令人讨厌的事情。

Recently, Mom told me it's not just NANA who's watching over me, it's ALL my relatives who've passed away. I kind of wish she hadn't told me that, because now when I copy off of Alex Arruda's paper during a spelling test, I feel a lot more guilty about it. I want to know how many generations this thing goes BACK. I'm fine with a few hundred years or so, but if it's my whole family tree all the way to the beginning, that's a totally different story.

最近，妈妈告诉我，不仅仅是外婆在守护着我，我所有的亲人都去世了。 我有点希望她没有告诉我这些，因为现在当我在拼写测试中抄下亚历克斯·阿鲁达的论文时，我对此感到更加内疚。 我想知道这个东西可以追溯到多少代以前。 我可以接受几百年左右的时间，但如果是我的整个家谱从头到尾，那就完全是另一回事了。

I mean, if I've got relatives from caveman times watching over me, those guys are probably gonna be pretty confused by what I do on an average day. To be honest, I'm not comfortable with all these people looking over my shoulder. If my relatives are really watching me every time I step out of the shower or taste my earwax, it's gonna be pretty awkward when we reunite later on.

我是说，如果我有穴居人时代的亲戚照看我，他们可能会对我每天的工作感到困惑。 老实说，这么多人盯着我看让我很不舒服。 如果每次我洗完澡走出来或者品尝耳垢的时候，我的亲戚都在盯着我，那我们以后重聚的时候就会很尴尬了。

Thursday We have the book fair at school this week, and this morning Mom gave me twenty dollars to spend. I THOUGHT I was allowed to pick whatever I wanted, but it turns out Mom expected me to spend the money on BOOKS. When you get the chance to own a giant pencil with googly eyes, though, it's kind of hard to pass up. Besides the pencil, I got a poster with a cat saying something sarcastic, an eraser shaped like a panda, a calculator that glows in the dark, a pen that writes underwater, and another giant pencil with googly eyes, just in case the first one gets lost or stolen.

星期四我们这周在学校有书展，今天早上妈妈给了我20美元让我花。 我原以为我可以随意挑选，但结果是妈妈希望我把钱花在买书上。 然而，当你有机会拥有一只带着大眼睛的巨型铅笔时，你很难拒绝。 除了铅笔，我还买了一张海报，上面画着一只说着讽刺话的猫，一块熊猫形状的橡皮，一个能在黑暗中发光的计算器，一支能在水下写字的钢笔，以及另一支有大眼睛的铅笔，以防第一只铅笔丢失或被盗。

I thought there was a chance Mom might not be happy with the way I spent her money, so I made sure to also buy a yo-yo with a good message on it. But Mom wasn't impressed. She says I have to go back tomorrow and trade in all the stuff I bought for books. Mom says the brain is like a muscle, and if you don't exercise it by reading and doing creative stuff, it'll get weak and mushy. She says video games and TV are making my brain flabby, and if something doesn't change I'm basically gonna be a mindless zombie for the rest of my life.

我想妈妈可能会对我花钱的方式不高兴，所以我也买了一个溜溜球，上面写着好的留言。 但妈妈不以为然。她说我明天必须回去把我买的书都换掉。 妈妈说大脑就像一块肌肉，如果你不通过阅读和做一些创造性的事情来锻炼它，它就会变得脆弱和糊状。 她说电子游戏和电视让我的大脑变得松弛，如果不改变的话，我的余生基本上都会变成一个没有头脑的僵尸。

Mom said if I turned off the television and put down my game controller, I might discover a talent I never knew I had. That's a nice idea and all, but I feel like every time Mom's tried to get me to step out of my comfort zone, I've fallen flat on my face. In the third grade we had a Poetry unit in school, and when I showed her what I was working on, Mom was pretty impressed. She sent one of my poems off to the National Poetry Council to see if THEY thought it was any good. Two weeks later, we got a letter back in the mail. Dear Gregory Heffley, Congratulations! Your poem," My Silly Summer has been chosen to appear in the prestigious phthalogy, an annual collection of the nation's best work by the most promising poets.

妈妈说，如果我关掉电视，放下游戏手柄，我可能会发现一种我从未意识到的天赋。 这是个好主意，但我觉得每次妈妈想让我走出自己的舒适区，我都失败了。 在三年级的时候，我们在学校有一个诗歌单元，当我给她看我正在做的东西时，妈妈非常印象深刻。 她把我的一首诗寄给了国家诗歌委员会，看他们是否认为它好。 两周后，我们收到了一封回信。 亲爱的格雷戈里·赫夫利：祝贺你！你的诗《我愚蠢的夏天》被选上了著名的《口腔病学》杂志，这是一本由最有前途的诗人每年出版的全国最佳作品集。