I want to admit something that I hope none of you take offense to. I don't get scrapbooking. Specifically, I don't get get spending all that money, effort, and time making a page around a picture look pretty or metaphoric and then tucking that page away in a book for only your family or closest friends to see. I would much rather post that picture publicly on my blog and write something funny about it than decorate it privately. At least that way, others would get to see or interpret the picture the way I see or interpret it.
For instance, look at this picture of me from sophomore or junior year (1992 or 1993) that my sister sent me:
When I first saw it, all I could think was, "OMG, where did that come from?" I don't remember taking it. Maybe my sister finally learned how to Photoshop. I wanted to stick it back in the envelope and forget it ever existed.
Then I really started to think about it. A picture that embarrassing makes for great blog fodder so now instead of hiding it, I'm going to make an attempt at captioning it:
- "Those who smelt it, dealt it, and from the looks of it, Staci had been smelling all day."
- "This is your brain. This is your brain on Pepsi, Pop Rocks, and Sun In. Any questions?"
- "David Caruso called. He wants his sunglasses back."
See, I'd rather make fun of myself than paste a bunch of cardboard daisies on my photo. Not that a gigantic daisy covering my face wouldn't be a good idea...
While I don't get scrapbooking now, in 1994 I was a picture taker of a different sort. Like the above picture isn't enough proof of that fact.
I was cleaning out my garage today and came across the box of yearbooks I brought back from my mom's last summer, a box that also included a gigantic photo album. I vaguely remembered the album from high school. I thought that it contained pictures of class trips, award assemblies, and graduation, along with some old Bulldog Bulletins from when I was editor of the school paper and clippings from the local newspapers showing what was going on at that time.
Oh, it contained those things all right, but that's not all it contained. The album also had page after page of my captioned take on the trips, assemblies, graduation, and newspaper clippings, which means it wasn't an album at all. It was a scrapbook.
Yes, in 1994 I was one of them.
I guess back then the stores weren't overflowing with scrapbooking materials so my snarky captions came courtesy of sayings that I cut out of Teen and Seventeen and others that I wrote on construction paper. Now here comes the sad part. I don't even understand half of the captions.
Okay, who am I kidding? I don't even understand three-fourths of them.
Here are a few of things that made me go hmm:
(Cue the C&C Music Factory song...)
- "Hack Cross: Fog Walk with Me." I have that on a page that contains a ticket stub from a New Kids concert and from a trip to Graceland. I don't get it at all.
- "Sigma Nu, the biting ducks, and 'It's in the corner. You can't miss it.'" That's on a page with a ribbon from the state science fair. I get the biting ducks part. We went to my science teacher's lakeside cabin, and I vaguely remember the ducks attacking us on the dock. Okay, I don't remember that so much as I remember seeing the pictures of that in the envelope of pictures my sister sent me a few weeks ago. Same difference, but what the heck are the other two things about?
- "Mom, send money fast. I sat on someone's bed without their permission." From the Girl's State page. Again I say, "Huh?"
- "After three movies, a comic book, an off-Broadway play, and 'The Man in the Lizards Skin Boots' video, real justice is served." From a page with a newspaper clipping entitled, "Buttafuoco gets maximum sentence." All I can say to that is, "When did Joey Buttafuoco do a music video?" I'll be searching for that baby on YouTube in a few minutes.
- "Only a senior, and already at the courthouse." On a picture of me taken in front of the county courthouse. I get that one, but I wish someone had beat that sentiment out of me before college. Seriously.
- "Julia Roberts marries country singer Lyle Lovett...and cuts hair AGAIN!!!" I wrote that next to a picture from Pretty Woman. Apparently, Julia Roberts' haircut was all kinds of traumatic for me. It still is. That's one woman who should not have a pixie cut or be blonde.
- And of course this little number:
I'm disappointed in myself. I totally missed the opportunity to write, "Run, OJ! Run!"
By Hollywoodize, I don't mean that I recast the rolls with well-known actors. For instance, I don't make the guy who used to knee me in the butt all through 8th grade pre-algebra look like Robert Pattinson.
If I were to do that, I probably wouldn't continue to remember the payback--me stabbing him in the knee with my pencil. Likewise, I don't make the daughter of my mom's boss, who I have known since preschool, look like Megan Fox in Jennifer's Body.
Maybe it's because that girl was a better actress than Megan, but who isn't?
What I mean is that, in my mind, I tend to make my former classmates a lot more attractive than they were, or I fill in the parts of them I can't remember with the parts I think they should have had. I have even exaggerated the "beauty" of the head cheerleader to such proportions in my mind that when I looked at her picture today, all I could say was, "Well, now I know she was popular for something other than her looks, and we all know what that something was."
(For the record, the head cheerleader is not the girl pictured above, but they were friends, and the girl was a cheerleader.)
In a way it's comforting to know that my childhood Mean Girls (and boys) were more a lot less Heathers than I remember them and a lot more Betty Joe Down the Street, at least so far as their looks were concerned. I feel slightly less ugly in comparison. However, it's not so comforting to know that I probably won't recognize a soul at my 20 year reunion.
Then again, maybe that's not such a bad thing.
