Yearbook
For those of you who have chosen professions that do not require daily interaction with thirteen-year-olds, the yearbooks have arrived. They are currently being passed and signed. In code. With indecipherable acronyms. What do they mean? It is best that we don’t know.
The yearbook is a frightening and dangerous thing. Did you know this? It may seem to be nothing more than a happy collection of passport photos spiced with candid shots of the walk-a-thon, the spring musical, the volleyball team in action against Northview, and microscope labs. But don’t be fooled. The middle school yearbook is far from innocuous. It is concrete, published and distributed, evidence of how little we matter. If there were any doubts about a person’s status in the middle school social hierarchy, the arrival of the yearbook, and the (actual, literal) self-examination that follows, makes it crystal clear that most of us are fleas on the stray dog that is about to be euthanized at the humane society of the middle school campus world. Dorks.
You must have done this back when your own yearbooks arrived in your first period class or your “homeroom” or wherever. You looked through every single page of the new yearbook, searching for pictures of yourself. Admit it, you scoured the thing. Of course, there was the one picture you could always count on (unless you were absent on picture day and make-up picture day. What is with that? Did you have mono or something?) That would be the alphabetized one next to the girl you had been standing in line behind since kindergarten. But you were looking for other pictures, pictures that showed you standing in the world with people who may have even looked like friends. You probably made a list, an index, of all of the pages on which you could be found. Maybe you even shared this list with your peers as you signed their yearbooks. “See me on pages 6, 14, 82, 112 and 114. KIT. Let’s party this summer! Call Me! BFFFFFF”
Did you really appear on all of those pages? I hate you. We all do. Those of us who weren’t in the yearbook class with you, I mean. The ones you teased when you came in and took our pictures while we had our social studies textbooks open on our desks, or while we were standing in line to buy powdery white donettes at snack time. You made us think that we had a prayer of showing up in the Illustrated Who’s Who of Middle School. But we never really did. Did we? There wasn’t even film in the camera. Whatever.
Am I coming across as bitter or resentful or damaged? Sorry about that. I’m OK, now. Really I am. The electroshock therapy is really starting to stick. Seems like it anyway… this time around. It’s because when I was a 7th grader, I spent four hours pouring through my own yearbook, seeking any evidence of my existence. Foreground, background, anyground. I was looking through photographed windows, at reflections and shadows, trying to figure out, with the help of context clues (sun position, other people in the picture, type of activity being undertaken) if I was anywhere to be found on that campus.
Eventually, I was able to find a picture that showed two people running in P.E. clothes. These were people that I know for sure (probably, I think) I may have run next to in P.E. at some point during the school year. And, if you look to the left of them, just at the edge of the frame there is an elbow. It is a goofy looking elbow with freckles. It looks insecure. I think it’s mine.
I wish that as a 7th grader I would have had it in me to find this funny. I wish I could have made it in to a joke. I could have gone around signing everyone else’s yearbooks right on top of that picture, drawing arrows pointing at my elbow and talking loudly during class (but in a way that my teachers found charming and disarming.) All of the girls would have been impressed. But I wasn’t that kind of 7th grader, was I? If I had been, you can bet there would have been more than just a picture of my elbow in the yearbook.
For those of you who have chosen professions that do not require daily interaction with thirteen-year-olds, the yearbooks have arrived. They are currently being passed and signed. In code. With indecipherable acronyms. What do they mean? It is best that we don’t know.
The yearbook is a frightening and dangerous thing. Did you know this? It may seem to be nothing more than a happy collection of passport photos spiced with candid shots of the walk-a-thon, the spring musical, the volleyball team in action against Northview, and microscope labs. But don’t be fooled. The middle school yearbook is far from innocuous. It is concrete, published and distributed, evidence of how little we matter. If there were any doubts about a person’s status in the middle school social hierarchy, the arrival of the yearbook, and the (actual, literal) self-examination that follows, makes it crystal clear that most of us are fleas on the stray dog that is about to be euthanized at the humane society of the middle school campus world. Dorks.
You must have done this back when your own yearbooks arrived in your first period class or your “homeroom” or wherever. You looked through every single page of the new yearbook, searching for pictures of yourself. Admit it, you scoured the thing. Of course, there was the one picture you could always count on (unless you were absent on picture day and make-up picture day. What is with that? Did you have mono or something?) That would be the alphabetized one next to the girl you had been standing in line behind since kindergarten. But you were looking for other pictures, pictures that showed you standing in the world with people who may have even looked like friends. You probably made a list, an index, of all of the pages on which you could be found. Maybe you even shared this list with your peers as you signed their yearbooks. “See me on pages 6, 14, 82, 112 and 114. KIT. Let’s party this summer! Call Me! BFFFFFF”
Did you really appear on all of those pages? I hate you. We all do. Those of us who weren’t in the yearbook class with you, I mean. The ones you teased when you came in and took our pictures while we had our social studies textbooks open on our desks, or while we were standing in line to buy powdery white donettes at snack time. You made us think that we had a prayer of showing up in the Illustrated Who’s Who of Middle School. But we never really did. Did we? There wasn’t even film in the camera. Whatever.
Am I coming across as bitter or resentful or damaged? Sorry about that. I’m OK, now. Really I am. The electroshock therapy is really starting to stick. Seems like it anyway… this time around. It’s because when I was a 7th grader, I spent four hours pouring through my own yearbook, seeking any evidence of my existence. Foreground, background, anyground. I was looking through photographed windows, at reflections and shadows, trying to figure out, with the help of context clues (sun position, other people in the picture, type of activity being undertaken) if I was anywhere to be found on that campus.
Eventually, I was able to find a picture that showed two people running in P.E. clothes. These were people that I know for sure (probably, I think) I may have run next to in P.E. at some point during the school year. And, if you look to the left of them, just at the edge of the frame there is an elbow. It is a goofy looking elbow with freckles. It looks insecure. I think it’s mine.
I wish that as a 7th grader I would have had it in me to find this funny. I wish I could have made it in to a joke. I could have gone around signing everyone else’s yearbooks right on top of that picture, drawing arrows pointing at my elbow and talking loudly during class (but in a way that my teachers found charming and disarming.) All of the girls would have been impressed. But I wasn’t that kind of 7th grader, was I? If I had been, you can bet there would have been more than just a picture of my elbow in the yearbook.
posted by kyle at 9:16 PM
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