Memories of Yearbook

The bottom shelf of my five-tiered bookshelf contains binders and folders of portfolio stuff. I'm glad to have it, but it's gotten messy as I've been adding things to the pile, so yesterday afternoon I spent a little while cleaning it out. I found a bunch of interesting things that I forgot that I had.

Besides my growing collection of ward newsletters and the standard portfolio folders I had to design for past undergraduate classes, I discovered my Beginning Folklore final project (a collection of stories about England study abroad live-in experiences), my final project in my Technical Writing class (a manual about the London Underground), notes from my grant proposal project in my Advanced Technical Writing class, a folder full of other miscellaneous editing projects from classes and work, a magazine from an editing freelance project I helped with, and seven magazines that I have contributed to at work.

I also found three Jostens folders of stuff from high school Yearbook. Most of you probably remember Jostens as the company that has a monopoly on everything high school: Yearbooks, graduation announcements, graduation paraphernalia, class rings, etc. I don't know why I've hung onto these folders in their entirety for so long; I guess I kept thinking I was going to use them sometime in the future. But one of the folders was entirely filled with page layout paper. When am I going to use an entire folder of that stuff? Probably never. So I got rid of most of it.

But finding these folders brought back memories like crazy. I loved being involved in Yearbook. Everyone loved the Yearbook staff--except for the newspaper staff. For some reason we had an unofficial feud. The really weird people worked for the newspaper and the "good" people worked for the Yearbook. Apparently that was the stereotype. Sometimes we'd send each other little gifts of love, like notes on Valentine's Day, saying how one staff was sooooo much better than the other staff. One experience in particular that really stands out was the time that we sent the newspaper staff a note saying something to the extent of "newspapers get thrown away; Yearbooks live on forever!" They weren't too happy with us after that.

Another folder I found contained pages and pages of layouts I had designed. I was the Layout editor my junior and senior years. I kept only the good designs that I initially wanted to enter in the Yearbook camp layout design competition. The rewards were cash, starting in the $100s. I couldn't go to the camp my senior year, so I gave them to our editor-in-chief--to my knowledge, she never entered them for me. I was upset, but I've moved on with that... I also apparently kept the collection of headline designs I'd collected over my high school years. Those were thrown out really fast. I don't think I ever want to look at high school yearbooks for headline ideas ever again.

Then there were the really thought-provoking papers I found--notes I'd written to myself about how much I was upset with the Yearbook advisor, my fellow staff members, people in high school...most often I took the Yearbook very, very seriously and didn't like missing deadlines. I also didn't like people who weren't cooperating and who couldn't get their work done. That statement applied to most of our staff, so of course I spent a lot of time wondering why we even accepted half of the people that we did. And one of those people was a guy who ended up being my ex-boyfriend, which was weird. The classroom was split into two portions with an office in the back for the editors--I spent a lot of time in there. We editors basically made that office our home, and we were in there all. the. time. with our then-state-of-the-art Macintosh computers and laser printer.

But I also found some fun papers--the notices we wrote to accepted staff members that mentioned having orange juice and dancing on tables for fun, talking about throwing stale licorice all over our cinderblock-office walls when we were frustrated, playing solitaire when we were bored, and talking with each other about how funny it would be if we actually grew up to be editors... (two of us actually did, one of them being me).

Anyway. Good times. I think I got involved with inscape because I missed layout and design. I don't get to do any of that at work.