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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.