Schools Yearbook Quotes

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who know where their high school yearbook is and those who do not.

Suddenly, it's all too much. Bryn and the bump watch. Vanessa with my high school yearbook. The idea that nothing's sacred. Everything's fodder. That my life belongs to anyone but me.

I also feared boredom and mediocrity much more than I feared failure. For me, great is better than terrible, and terrible is better than mediocre, because terrible at least gives life flavor. The high school yearbook quote my friends chose for me was from Thoreau: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Is it? Because that picture of me was taken by my old school's yearbook club, and they put it in the section titled 'STUDENT FAILSAUCES! XD. What's an XD? A sideways laughing face of horrendous proportions. Don't change the subject.

oh, my God," I whispered. "But how did they get my photo? Alex tapped his mouth with his thumb. "That ...book with everyone's picture in it, that you have in high school." "Yearbook," I said. Was he trying to be funny? But of course he was right; that's exactly where it was from.

I had taken the photograph from afar (distance being the basic glitch in our relationship), using my Nikon and zoom lens while hiding behind a fake marble pillar. I was hiding because if he knew I'd been secretly photographing him for all these months he would think I was immature, neurotic and obsessive. I'm not. I'm an artist. Artists are always misunderstood.(Thwonk)

Emira realized that Briar probably didn't know how to say good-bye because she never had to do it before. But whether she said good-bye or not, Briar was about to become a person who existed without Emira. She'd go to sleepovers with girls she met at school, and she'd have certain words that she'd always forget how to spell. She'd be a person who sometimes said things like, "Seriously?" or "That's so funny" and she'd ask a friend if this was her water or theirs. Briar would say good-bye in yearbook signatures and through heartbroken tears and through emails and over the phone. But she'd never say good-bye to Emira, which made it seem that Emira would never be completely free from her. For the rest of her life and for zero dollars an hour, Emira would always be Briar's sitter.

You go through life thinking there's so much you need. Your favorite jeans and sweater. The jacket with the faux-fur lining to keep you warm. Your phone and your music and your favorite books. Mascara. Irish breakfast tea and cappuccinos from Trouble Coffee. You need your yearbooks, every stiffly posed school-dance photo, the notes your friends slipped into your locker. You need the camera you got for your sixteenth birthday and the flowers you dried. You need your notebooks full of the things you learned and don't want to forget. You need your bedspread, white with black diamonds. You need your pillow - it fits the way you sleep. You need magazines promising self-improvement. You need your running shoes and your sandals and your boots. Your grade report from the semester you got straight As. Your prom dress, your shiny earrings, your pendants on delicate chains. You need your underwear, your light-colored bras and your black ones. The dream catcher hanging above your bed. The dozens and dozens of shells in glass jars... You think you need all of it. Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother.

Bookaholics are the ones who start to feel uncomfortable and uneasy in another person’s house, and suddenly realize there are no bookshelves or magazines lying around. People who only own a telephone book and their high school yearbooks scare us.

In my high school yearbook I was voted third runner-up for “Most Casual.” I never figured out if that meant most casual in dress or in overall manner. In any case, I didn’t come in first. I guess the two ahead of me wanted it less.

Who was she in high school? Little Miss Nobody. She could have embroidered it on her sweaters, tattooed it across her forehead. And in small letters: i am shit, i am anonymous, step on me. please. She wasn't voted Most Humorous in her high school yearbook or Best Dancer or Most Likely to Succeed, and she wasn't in the band or Spanish Club and when her ten year reunion rolled around nobody would recognize her or have a single memory to share.

Flora hadn't signed my yearbook. When I got it back from the cheerleaders, I skimmed over the last few pages and saw that every one of them signed except for her. I was disappointed but I wasn't surprised. We were too much of everything to be summed up in a few sentences. -Sean Foster

In my high school yearbook there is a note from a girl who wrote, 'I like you even though you are very mean.' I do not remember the girl who wrote this note. I do not remember being mean to her, or to anyone, for that matter. I do remember that I was feral in high school, socially awkward, emotionally closed off, completely lost. Or maybe I don't want to remember being mean because I've changed in the twenty years between then and now. Around my junior year, I went from being quiet and withdrawn to being mean, where mean was saying exactly what I thought and making sarcastic comments relentlessly. Sincerity was dead to me.

Carmack was of the moment. His ruling force was focus. Time existed for him not in some promising future or sentimental past but in the present condition, the intricate web ol problems and solutions, imagination and code. He kept nothing from the past–no pictures, no records, no games, no computer disks. He didn’t even save copies of his first games, Wraith and Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at school, no magazine copies of his early publications. He kept nothing but what he needed at the time. His bedroom consisted of a lamp, a pillow, a blanket, and a stack of books. There was no mattress. All he brought with him from home was a cat named Mitzi (a gift from his stepfamily) with a mean streak and a reckless bladder.

Artoo, I'm switching back to regular handwriting. Calligraphy is hard, and I didn't bring my good pens. Or I need more practice. Right now you're sitting across from me, probably writing HAGS 30 times in a row. I know a little bit of a lot of languages, but even so, I struggle to put this into words. Okay. I'm just going to do it. First of all, I need you to know I'm not putting this out there with any hope of reciprocation. This is something I have to get off my chest (cliché, sorry) before we go our separate ways (cliché). It's the last day of school, and therefore my last chance. "Crush" is too weak a word to describe how I feel. It doesn't do you justice, but maybe it works for me. I am the one who is crushed. I'm crushed that we have only ever regarded each other as enemies. I'm crushed when the day ends and I haven't said anything to you that isn't coated in five layers of sarcasm. I'm crushed, concluding this year without having known that you like melancholy music or eat cream cheese straight from the tub in the middle of the night or play with your bangs when you're nervous, as though you're worried they look bad. (They never do.) You're ambitious, clever, interesting, and beautiful. I put "beautiful" last because for some reason, I have a feeling you'd roll your eyes if I wrote it first. But you are. You're beautiful and adorable and so fucking charming. And you have this energy that radiates off you, a shimmering optimism I wish I could borrow for myself sometimes. You're looking at me like you can't believe I'm not done yet, so let me wrap this up before I turn it into a five-paragraph essay. But if this were an essay, here's the thesis statement: I'm in love with you, Rowan Roth. Please don't make too much fun of me at graduation? Yours, Neil P. McNair

Please, God, please, don't let me be normal! (high school yearbook)

Last thing he needed was a lecture about his abandoned beliefs. Well, maybe not abandoned, but stuffed in the attic with yearbooks and high school soccer trophies.

I asked Hillary why she had chosen Yale Law School over Harvard. She laughed and said, "Harvard didn't want me." I said I was sorry that Harvard turned her down. She replied, "No, I received letters of acceptance from both schools." She explained that a boyfriend had then invited her to the Harvard Law School Christmas Dance, at which several Harvard Law School professors were in attendance. She asked one for advice about which law school to attend. The professor looked at her and said, "We have about as many woen as we need here. You should go to Yale. The teaching there is more suited to women." I asked who the professor was, and she told me she couldn't remember his name but that she thought it started with a B. A few days later, we met the Clintons at a party. I came prepared with yearbook photos of all the professors from that year whose name began with B. She immediately identified the culprit. He was the same professor who had given my A student a D, because she didn't "think like a lawyer." It turned out, of course, that it was this professor -- and not the two (and no doubt more) brilliant women he was prejudiced against - who didn't think like a lawyer. Lawyers are supposed to act on the evidence, rather than on their prejudgments. The sexist professor ultimately became a judge on the International Court of Justice. I told Hillary that it was too bad I wasn't at that Christmas dance, because I would have urged her to come to Harvard. She laughed, turned to her husband, and said, "But then I wouldn't have met him... and he wouldn't have become President.

YO MAMA SO OLD... Yo mama so old the back of her head looks like a raisin. Yo mama so old her social security number is 1. Yo mama so old when she was a child rainbows were still in black and white. Yo mama so old when she was in school there was no history class. Yo mama so old she has a picture of Moses in her yearbook. Yo mama so old she was a crossing guard when Moses parted the red sea. Yo mama so old she was a waitress at the Last Supper. Yo mama so old she has an autographed bible. Yo mama so old she knew Mr. Clean when he had an afro. Yo mama so old she knew Gandalf before he had a beard.

Baby girl, this is your mother. I know I’ve given you explicit instructions to trace this into your yearbook, but they’re my words. That means this is from me, my heart, and my love for you. There’s so many things I want to say to you, things I want you to hear, to know, but let’s start with the reason I’m having you put these words in your senior yearbook. First of all, this book is everything. It may be pictures, some names of people you won’t remember in five years, ten years, or longer, but this book is more important than you can imagine. It’s the first book that’s the culmination of your first chapter in life. You will have many. So many! But this book is the physical manifestation of your first part in life. Keep it. Treasure it. Whether you enjoyed school or not, it’s done. It’s in your past. These were the times you were a part of society from a child to who you are now, a young adult woman. When you leave for college, you’re continuing your education, but you’re moving onto your next chapter in life. The beginning of adulthood. This yearbook is your bridge. Keep this as a memento forever. It sums up who you grew up with. It houses images of the buildings where your mind first began to learn things, where you first began to dream, to set goals, to yearn for the road ahead. It’s so bittersweet, but those memories were your foundation to set you up for who you will become in the future. Whether they brought pain or happiness, it’s important not to forget. From here, you will go on and you will learn the growing pains of becoming an adult. You will refine your dreams. You will set new limits. Change your mind. You will hurt. You will laugh. You will cry, but the most important is that you will grow. Always, always grow, honey. Challenge yourself. Put yourself in uncomfortable situations (BUT BE SAFE!) and push yourself not to think about yourself, your friends, your family, but to think about the world. Think about others. Understand others, and if you can’t understand, then learn more about them. It’s so very important. Once you have the key to understanding why someone else hurts or dreams or survives, then you have ultimate knowledge. You have empathy. Oh, honey. As I’m writing this, I can see you on the couch reading a book. You are so very beautiful, but you are so very humble. You don’t see your beauty, and I want you to see your beauty. Not just physical, but your inner kindness and soul. It’s blinding to me. That’s how truly stunning you are. Never let anyone dim your light. Here are some words I want you to know as you go through the rest of your life: Live. Learn. Love. Laugh. And, honey, know. Just know that I am with you always.

None of it makes any sense to me. This girl is a freaky, genius-level kind of smart. She’ll probably be voted Most Likely to Win the Nobel Prize in her yearbook. If I still went to school, I’d be voted Most Likely to Depress People.

I shall never forget you… Hearts that know you love you And lips that have given you laughter Have gone to their lifetime of grief and of roses Searching for dreams that they lost In the world, far away from your walls. —Ottawa High School yearbook, 1925

And she has been there. I know because her senior high school yearbook, the one with no Daytons, is gone from the bureau where i had left it. She's seen my things scattered about. She knows I'm still here. But she didn't wait Part of me doesn't want to give up, and makes excuses. "She'll be back =," it says. "She just didn't want to run into Aunt Ida. Now that she knows you're here..." But she knew it. Where else would I be? I have to face it: I'm not as important as some package she needs from Seattle. My presence won't bring her back.

The appearance of the yearbook clears up another high school mystery - why all the popular girls put up with the disgusting habits of Todd Ryder. He is a pig. Greasy, sleazy, foul-mouthed, and unwashed, he'll make a great addition to a state college fraternity. But the popular kissed up to him all year. Why? Todd Ryder is the yearbook photographer.

I have always noticed in high school yearbooks the similarity of all the graduate write-ups—how, after only a few pages, the identities of all the unsullied young faces blur, how one person melts into another and another: Susan likes to eat at Wendy’s; Donald was on the basketball team; Norman is vain about his varsity sweater; Gillian broke her arm on Spring Retreat; Brian is a car nut; Sue wants to live in Hawaii; Don wants to make a million and be a ski bum; Noreen wants to live in Europe; Gordon wants to be a radio deejay in Australia. At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities—to clarify just who it is we really are?

...I began pulling out old pictures and yearbooks from our Los Angeles high schools and UC Berkeley. Suddenly there we were, thousands of trim-haired, neatly-dressed, conservative-looking youngsters, with perky, forced smiles, encased in identical inch by inch-and-a-quarter boxes for our children to snicker at. Only they did not snicker. “Mom, this isn’t the 60s, is it?

I wish I had asked myself when I was younger. My path was so tracked that in my 8th-grade yearbook, one of my friends predicted— accurately— that four years later I would enter Stanford as a sophomore. And after a conventionally successful undergraduate career, I enrolled at Stanford Law School, where I competed even harder for the standard badges of success. The highest prize in a law student’s world is unambiguous: out of tens of thousands of graduates each year, only a few dozen get a Supreme Court clerkship. After clerking on a federal appeals court for a year, I was invited to interview for clerkships with Justices Kennedy and Scalia. My meetings with the Justices went well. I was so close to winning this last competition. If only I got the clerkship, I thought, I would be set for life. But I didn’t. At the time, I was devastated. In 2004, after I had built and sold PayPal, I ran into an old friend from law school who had helped me prepare my failed clerkship applications. We hadn’t spoken in nearly a decade. His first question wasn’t “How are you doing?” or “Can you believe it’s been so long?” Instead, he grinned and asked: “So, Peter, aren’t you glad you didn’t get that clerkship?” With the benefit of hindsight, we both knew that winning that ultimate competition would have changed my life for the worse. Had I actually clerked on the Supreme Court, I probably would have spent my entire career taking depositions or drafting other people’s business deals instead of creating anything new. It’s hard to say how much would be different, but the opportunity costs were enormous. All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past. the best paths are new and untried. will this business still be around a decade from now? business is like chess. Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else. The few who knew what might be learned, Foolish enough to put their whole heart on show, And reveal their feelings to the crowd below, Mankind has always crucified and burned. Above all, don’t overestimate your own power as an individual. Founders are important not because they are the only ones whose work has value, but rather because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody at his company. That we need individual founders in all their peculiarity does not mean that we are called to worship Ayn Randian “prime movers” who claim to be independent of everybody around them. In this respect, Rand was a merely half-great writer: her villains were real, but her heroes were fake. There is no Galt’s Gulch. There is no secession from society. To believe yourself invested with divine self-sufficiency is not the mark of a strong individual, but of a person who has mistaken the crowd’s worship—or jeering—for the truth. The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.

...girl reached across her desk and pulled the computer keyboard over. “What’s his name?” she said. “Crowley,” Julianna said, surprised. “Christopher Wayne Crowley.” “I shouldn’t do this.” The girl looked back up at Genevieve and laughed. “But fuck it, right?” Genevieve's disappearance from the state fair had been news for about a day. Okay, maybe for a couple of weeks. She was beautiful—the Daily Oklahoman ran her picture with every story, a photo of her from the previous year’s U. S. Grant High School yearbook. Genevieve had thought the photo...

With only three days left of school, yearbooks arrive. There are several blank pages in the back for signatures, but everybody knows the place of honor is the back cover. Of course I’ve saved mine for Peter. I never want to forget how special this year was. My yearbook quote is “I have spread my dreams under your feet; /Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” I had a very hard time choosing between that and “Without you, today’s emotions would be the scurf of yesterday’s.” Peter was like, “I know that’s from Amélie, but what the hell is a scurf?” and honestly, he had a point. Peter let me write his. “Surprise me,” he said. As we walk through the cafeteria doors, someone holds the door for us, and Peter says, “Cheers.” Peter’s taken to saying cheers instead of thanks, which I know he learned from Ravi. It makes me smile every time. For the past month or so, the cafeteria’s been half-empty at lunch. Most of the seniors have been eating off-campus, but Peter likes the lunches his mom packs and I like our cafeteria’s french fries. But because the student council’s passing out our yearbooks today, it’s a full house. I pick up my copy and run back to the lunch table with it. I flip to his page first. There is Peter, smiling in a tuxedo. And there is his quote: “You’re welcome.” --Peter Kavinsky. Peter’s brow furrows when he sees it. “What does that even mean?” “It means, here I am, so handsome and lovely to look at.” I spread my arms out benevolently, like I am the pope. “You’re welcome.” Darrell busts out laughing, and so does Gabe, who spreads his arms out too. “You’re welcome,” they keep saying to each other. Peter shakes his head at all of us. “You guys are nuts.” Leaning forward, I kiss him on the lips. “And you love it!

Declan Lynch was a liar. He'd been a liar his entire life. Lies came to him fluidly, easily, instinctively. What does your father do for a living? He sells high-end sports cars in the summer, life insurance in the winter. He's an anesthesiologist. He does financial consulting for divorcees. He does advertising work for international companies in English-speaking markets. He's in the FBI. Where did he meet your mother? They were on yearbook together in high school. They were set up by friends. She took his picture at the county fair, said she wanted to keep his smile forever. Why can't Ronan come to a sleepover? He sleepwalks. Once he walked out to the road and my father had to convince a trucker who'd stopped before hitting him he was really his son. How did your mother die? Brain bleed. Rare. Genetic. Passes from mother to daughter, which is the only good thing, 'cause she only had sons. How are you doing? Fine. Good. Great. At a certain point, the truth felt worse. Truth was a closed-casket funeral attended by its estranged living relatives, Lies, Safety, Secrets. He lied to everyone. He lied to his lovers, his friends, his brothers. Well. More often he simply didn't tell his brothers the truth.

The genesis of my interest in being a writer can be traced to fourth grade when we listened to a radio production of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and I asked the teacher if I could rewrite it for our class to present. Nothing like going head-to-head with the Bard, right? I can still visualise the pages I filled creating this first "great" literary endeavor. Encouraged by teachers (and one doting grandmother), I went on to write reams of yearbook copy in high school and college and, then, to teach high school English. My "real" writing career didn't begin until I turned from education to the full-time pursuit of storytelling.

Do you want some help?"said Liam, rising. "No, thanks." She smiled at him, the man without a past with whom she was falling in love, and shook her head. He could help her later, she thought, when she brought down the larger boxes, big box with the theater programs and school yearbooks, and the little leather case that held the fans and the sketches and the pieces of needlework. But first, she would go alone to bring down the letters it would be the last time she would have Grandma Jo to herself. "Thanks, but I want to do this on my own." "Independent family, aren't they?" Liam grumbled to Matthew, sitting down again. "You don't know the half," said Matthew.

There aren't many classrooms in the school basement. Most of the space is for storage and utilities. As far as student use goes, the darkroom is down there, along with yearbook and the school paper. Places that either don't require much light or are used by students so happy to be there that they don't care. The only illumination comes from the fluorescents overhead and what filters in from the hallway through the glass upper half of the doors. It usually takes me about ten minutes in French to lose my focus completely. This time,it took less.We were learning the past imperfect tense, which, as well as being completely incomprehensible in practice, in theory describes a state where every action was either left incomplete, unfulfilled, or repeated over and over.

began to walk home, very quickly. A car full of high-school girls screeched around the corner. They were the girls who ran all the clubs and won all the elections in Allison’s high-school class: little Lisa Leavitt; Pam McCormick, with her dark ponytail, and Ginger Herbert, who had won the Beauty Revue; Sissy Arnold, who wasn’t as pretty as the rest of them but just as popular. Their faces—like movie starlets’, universally worshiped in the lower grades—smiled from practically every page of the yearbook. There they were, triumphant, on the yellowed, floodlit turf of the football field—in cheerleader uniform, in majorette spangles, gloved and gowned for homecoming; convulsed with laughter on a carnival ride (Favorites) or tumbling elated in the back of a September haywagon (Sweethearts)—and despite the range of costume, athletic to casual to formal wear, they were like dolls whose smiles and hair-dos never changed.

Regardless of psychological gymnastics, we know what we see, and many of us learn from it. It’s a rare mover who becomes a collector of anything. Even rarer is a mover who gets hung up on the “sentimental value” of objects. After more than three thousand moves I know that everyone has almost the exact same stuff and I certainly know where it’s all going to end up. It’s going to end up in a yard sale or in a dumpster. It might take a generation, though usually not, but Aunt Tillie’s sewing machine is getting tossed. So is your high school yearbook and grandma’s needlepoint doily of the Eiffel Tower. Most people save the kids kindergarten drawings and the IKEA bookcases. After the basement and attic are full it’s off to a mini-storage to put aside more useless stuff. A decade or three down the road when the estate is settled and nobody wants to pay the storage fees anymore, off it all will go into the ether. This is not anecdotal. I know because I’m the guy who puts it all into the dumpster.

You go through life thinking there’s so much you need. Your favorite jeans and sweater. The jacket with the faux-fur lining to keep you warm. Your phone and your music and your favorite books. Mascara. Irish Breakfast tea and cappuccinos from Trouble Coffee. You need your yearbooks, every stiffly posed school-dance photo, the notes your friends slipped into your locker. You need the camera you got for your sixteenth birthday and the flowers you dried. You need your notebooks full of the things you learned and don’t want to forget. You need your bedspread, white with black diamonds. You need your pillow—it fits the way you sleep. You need magazines promising self-improvement. You need your running shoes and your sandals and your boots. Your grade report from the semester you got straight As. Your prom dress, your shiny earrings, your pendants on delicate chains. You need your underwear, your light-colored bras and your black ones. The watercolor sunset hanging above your bed. The dozens and dozens of shells in glass jars. You think you need all of it. Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother.

YOU GO THROUGH LIFE thinking there’s so much you need. Your favorite jeans and sweater. The jacket with the faux-fur lining to keep you warm. Your phone and your music and your favorite books. Mascara. Irish Breakfast tea and cappuccinos from Trouble Coffee. You need your yearbooks, every stiffly posed school-dance photo, the notes your friends slipped into your locker. You need the camera you got for your sixteenth birthday and the flowers you dried. You need your notebooks full of the things you learned and don’t want to forget. You need your bedspread, white with black diamonds. You need your pillow—it fits the way you sleep. You need magazines promising self-improvement. You need your running shoes and your sandals and your boots. Your grade report from the semester you got straight As. Your prom dress, your shiny earrings, your pendants on delicate chains. You need your underwear, your light-colored bras and your black ones. The watercolor sunset hanging above your bed. The dozens and dozens of shells in glass jars. The cab was waiting outside the station. The airport, I said, but no sound came out. “The airport,” I said, and we pulled away. You think you need all of it. Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother.

I’m going to visit you every day. And then someday, when they find a way to reverse your condition scientifically, medically, we’ll buy some land with wonderful trees and build treehouses in every one of them. And we could have a bunch of kids, and read plays together, as a family, and on clear nights, we’ll look at the stars. Can you picture it? And if you decide you don’t want kids, Totally okay, totally fine. We’ll read every book and watch every show and sleep in and travel and make money and art and love all the time, whenever we want. Or we could adopt a couple big dogs. You’ve always wanted big dogs, right?” Lewis stared at her blankly as his tail swished in the surf behind him. “Why aren’t you saying anything? Please say something,” Wren begged, clutching him harder. “I’m not the person I used to be. I’m not the man you married.” “What do you mean?” Lewis wished he could embrace her back, wrap two human arms around her small, shivering frame. He tried to do the best he could with words: “It’s like standing in my childhood bedroom, looking around at the comic books, action figures, and school yearbooks with signatures from all the girls, and remembering how that tiny room used to be my only stake in the world. I don’t know how else to explain it. There are things I cannot unsee.

Using the Worst-Case Scenario Technique Another way to correct inaccurate expectations is to imagine what would happen if the worst possible scenario occurred. Pretend that everything has gone wrong at once. Picture all the details and then exaggerate them. As you visualize the worst situation possible, you may start to laugh. The scene will seem so ridiculous that you realize there is not the slightest chance that it will take place. Lupe used the worst-case scenario technique after deciding that she really wanted to join the yearbook committee. The students in the group met after school once a week, and Lupe felt anxious about attending her first meeting. She was certain she would clamp up when people spoke to her. The morning before the meeting, she relaxed and imagined the worst things that could happen. She pictured herself saying something and everyone ignoring her. She pictured her face getting so red that it looked like she was going to explode. Then she imagined people laughing at her, saying she didn’t belong. This exercise helped Lupe realize that her fears were unfounded. That afternoon, after a little pep talk and a few deep breaths, Lupe walked into the meeting. She was relieved that people were genuinely happy to have her there. She felt proud that she was able to be involved in a situation that she would have previously avoided.

It's like standing in my childhood bedroom, looking around at the comic books, action figures, and school yearbooks with signatures from all the girls, and remembering how that tiny room used to be my only stake in the world.

My path was so tracked that in my 8th-grade yearbook, one of my friends predicted—accurately—that four years later I would enter Stanford as a sophomore. And after a conventionally successful undergraduate career, I enrolled at Stanford Law School, where I competed even harder for the standard badges of success. The highest prize in a law student’s world is unambiguous: out of tens of thousands of graduates each year, only a few dozen get a Supreme Court clerkship. After clerking on a federal appeals court for a year, I was invited to interview for clerkships with Justices Kennedy and Scalia. My meetings with the Justices went well. I was so close to winning this last competition. If only I got the clerkship, I thought, I would be set for life. But I didn’t. At the time, I was devastated. In 2004, after I had built and sold PayPal, I ran into an old friend from law school who had helped me prepare my failed clerkship applications. We hadn’t spoken in nearly a decade. His first question wasn’t “How are you doing?” or “Can you believe it’s been so long?” Instead, he grinned and asked: “So, Peter, aren’t you glad you didn’t get that clerkship?” With the benefit of hindsight, we both knew that winning that ultimate competition would have changed my life for the worse. Had I actually clerked on the Supreme Court, I probably would have spent my entire career taking depositions or drafting other people’s business deals instead of creating anything new. It’s hard to say how much would be different, but the opportunity costs were enormous. All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.

Noah,” she whispers in reprimand. “You’ve never complained when I’ve tried to undress you before.” Echo readjusts so she can see me, and for the first time since this morning, those eyes dance. “Yes, I have.” “When?” “The last day of school.” “So you’ve complained once.” When I led her to the nook of the abandoned hallway in the basement near my locker. I only meant to sneak in for a kiss during lunch, but things got hot and heavy and well...sue me. “I didn’t buy a yearbook, so I was memory-making.

I'm just crazy because I choose to be." - Marist High School yearbook, 1990

While we all grow and mature and change from that awkward little worm we were in high school, it is still a pretty consistent indicator of who we become as adult butterflies. High school sets a tone for how the next decade of your life plays out, good or bad. It is the first set of steps in your journey. If you want to know who you were as a person during this hormonal time, refer to your yearbook. You will find a theme and you will see a pattern. Most definitely, you will notice these themes and patterns carried on into your twenties and so on. Take those signatures serious.

I open the yearbook and start paging through it as fast as I can. Basketball games, Ping-Pong, Yearbook Club, Drama. I check the cover to make sure it’s not a mistake. It’s like I’m reading about another place entirely. The school in this book has nothing to do with the place where I spend my days, the place where three in ten of us won’t graduate. It doesn’t show the empty air around me as I wait alone in the school yard, the bathrooms I won’t go into, or the dead look I have to keep on my face as I go from class to class.

Looking through the book, I realized that there actually were several kids I didn’t know. Was it possible that I never shared a class with them in all twelve years of school? I scanned the yearbook

Carl discreetly turned his head to the left and then the right to make sure Mom wasn’t within hearing range. “I tried to stick it in er ass once and she didn’t speak to me for a week,” he nearly whispered before belting out a slur of loose chuckles. “And gettin’ ‘er to do ya on top? Forget about it!” In ways, I morphed into Carl’s description of the ideal woman. Like Mom, physical beauty was my ultimate priority. I spent hours on end stripped naked, posing in front of my full length bedroom mirror at every angle so that each wrinkle, roll, and pinch of fat could receive sharp scrutiny before I strived for complete self annihilation. I made it a habit of studying every Teen magazine model and the skinniest cheerleaders in my middle school yearbook. I observed their arms, legs, and hips. I held their images against mine with a goal for my bones to protrude further and calves spread further apart when standing straight. However, I saw the way Carl bent his head down and lowered his voice when he spoke about Mom, as if it was our job to keep a feisty, barking puppy believing that it was our guard dog. “Ure mom can’t help she got half ure I-Q,” Carl would chuckle.

published a Spanish–English paper for Fremont High School’s neighboring community as well as the school newspaper and yearbook.

Book 1 Item#4   Yearbooks   Whenever I find yearbooks for one or two dollars I always pick them up. Many people want to revisit their high school or college

You're Right, I Believe You

I still remember the smell of the South. It smelled like azaleas. And leaves. And peanuts. Peanuts everywhere. Planters peanuts had their headquarters in Suffolk. Mr. Obici ran it. He was a big deal in town. The big peanut man. He gave a lot of money out to people. He built a hospital. You could buy peanuts by the pound in Suffolk for nothing. There were farmers growing peanuts, hauling peanuts, making peanut oil, peanut butter, even peanut soap. They called the high school yearbook The Peanut. They even had a contest once to see who could make the best logo for Planters peanut company. Some lady won it. They gave her twenty-five dollars, which was a ton of money in those days.

Klan Klubs were established in high schools. Hooded teens soon had their place in yearbooks in Indiana, featured along with the Glee Club or the Debate Society among the accepted extracurriculars.

I’m in my bedroom. Pretending to hunt for an old high school yearbook so we can show her boyfriend.” “Ouch.” “Yeah.” “Okay, so to recap, I’m your pretend girlfriend and I have free rein in what I say? I can create a rich tapestry of our love?” “If you come and help me, you can do whatever the hell you want.” I can’t stop smiling. “Give me an hour.

On May 27, Bryn Mawr awarded 167 bachelor of arts degrees. Sixty percent of the class was headed straight to graduate or professional school. My friends and teachers had assumed I would go to law school, but I could not imagine devoting myself to the details of torts or civil procedure. If I decided to pursue further education, I knew it would be for graduate work in history. What had always captured me intellectually was the broad sweep of ideas and social forces. And having grown up in a changing and not-changing Virginia, I knew how those assumptions and circumstances exerted their power through time, often creating silences and blindnesses that undermined human possibility. From at least when I had written to Eisenhower as a nine-year-old, I had recognized the force and the burden of history; I understood the words of the white southern poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren: “History is what you can’t / Resign from.”11 Coming to terms with the past would ultimately become an intellectual and professional commitment as well as a personal necessity. I grew up to be a historian. My page in the Bryn Mawr college yearbook, 1968. On my right wrist I am wearing the bracelet my grandmother gave me the night my mother died. But not yet. I had decided I needed to be in the real world for a while. I had loved school since I began kindergarten at the age of four, and at Bryn Mawr I had become caught up not just in learning

I didn't know if the beginning of my story was in a promising private school and a yearbook full of hope and my ending was in here, in this ruined space, letting it all go. But I was determined to accept it, perhaps debate it, and then move on to a new story. I did want things. I wanted to express myself, I wanted to get out of my dead-end job, I wanted to feel loved, I wanted to love myself. I wanted to know that this what not the end. I couldn't start a new story until I gave words to the "why?" of it, even if it hurt, even if it felt too messy, even if it wasn't the story I set out to tell. It was my story and it was all I had. I dusted myself off and left the basement.

The [Madeira] School is still all girls and still thriving, and I am forever grateful for my time there and what it taught me. Not least of which is how to hold on tight and fake it during those trying stretches when functioning—and finishing—are not necessarily assured. To that end, I will repeat the line from my own senior yearbook page, not from Miss Madeira, but from Andrew Jackson: “You are uneasy; you’ve never sailed with me before, I see.

And then I think of Mom. I think of her going through my yearbook, inadvertently reminding me how I’ll never be as pretty as the other girls at school, how pretty she was when she was my age, how I’ll never be as pretty as her, and I suddenly want to be anywhere other than my own house.

If only you would apply yourself.” My teachers in high school told me that so often that they decided to really drill it in by writing it in my yearbook, over and over. I was a bad student. Still am. Busywork was the bane of my existence—those little homework assignments that felt like a waste of time, that required organizational skills like Writing Down Your Assignment and Not Losing Your Handout. These were difficult tasks for me. My locker was a pile of loose papers that got more and more crinkly as the weeks went on until it looked like the inside of a recycling bin. I discovered that if you ignore something long enough, it really does go away. Literally. The papers would disintegrate. I would pass just enough tests and do enough begging to eke by with a D. Sometimes.

Yo mama is so old… she knew Burger King while he was still a prince. Yo mama is so old… her first pet was a T-Rex! Yo mama is so old… she took her driving test on a dinosaur! Yo mama is so old… her birth certificate says expired on it. Yo mama is so old… she dated George Washington! Yo mama is so old… she has an autographed Bible! Yo mama is so old… that her bus pass is in hieroglyphics! Yo mama is so old… her birth certificate is in Roman numerals. Yo mama is so old… she used to babysit Adam and Eve! Yo mama is so old… her memory is in black and white! Yo mama is so old… she was wearing a Jesus starter jacket! Yo mama is so old… she farts dust! Yo mama is so old… she knew the Great Wall of China when it was only good! Yo mama is so old… she ran track with dinosaurs. Yo mama is so old… she has a picture of Moses in her yearbook. Yo mama is so old… that when she was in school there was no history class. Yo mama is so old… her social security number is 1! Yo mama is so old… she knew the Dead Sea when it started getting sick! Yo mama is so old… she helped serve the Last Supper! Yo mama is so old… I told her to act her own age, and she died. Yo mama is so old… she knew Mr. Clean when he had a head full of hair! Yo mama is so old… I took a picture of her and it came out black and white!

As public schools in the United States began desegregating and students of different skin tones were photographed for yearbooks in the same frame, the technical fixes that could be employed when a Black child was photographed alone were not useful. In particular, Black parents, objecting to the fact that their children’s facial features were rendered blurry, demanded higher-quality images.20 But the photographic industry did not fully take notice until companies that manufactured brown products like chocolate and wooden furniture began complaining that photographs did not depict their goods with enough subtlety, showcasing the varieties of chocolate and of grains in wood.

Yo momma is so fat… when a bus hit her she said, “Who threw the pebble?” Yo momma is so fat… when she puts on her yellow rain coat and walks down the street people shout out “taxi”! Yo momma is so fat… she uses the interstate as a slip and slide. Yo momma is so fat… you could use her bellybutton as a wishing well. Yo momma is so fat… the government forced her to wear taillights and blinkers so no one else would get hurt. Yo momma is so fat… she supplies 99% of the world’s gas. Yo momma is so fat… when she goes to Taco Bell, they run for the border! Yo momma is so fat… she rolled out of bed and everybody thought there was an earthquake. Yo momma is so fat… when God said, “Let there be light,” he had to ask her to move out of the way. Yo momma is so fat… she has more chins than a Chinese phone book. Yo momma is so fat… she jumped in the air and got stuck. Yo momma is so fat… she's got to wake up in sections. Yo momma is so skinny… Yo momma is so skinny… she can hang glide with a Dorito! Yo momma is so skinny… she swallowed a meatball and thought she was pregnant. Yo momma is so skinny… she turned sideways and disappeared. Yo momma is so skinny… she hula hoops with a cheerio. Yo momma is so skinny… she has to run around in the shower just to get wet. Yo momma is so skinny… she don’t get wet when it rains. Yo momma is so skinny… her nipples touch. Yo momma is so skinny… she has to wear a belt with her spandex pants. Yo momma is so skinny… she can see through peepholes with both eyes. Yo momma is so skinny… she can dive through a chain-linked fence. Yo momma is so skinny… she uses cotton balls for pillows. Yo momma is so old… Yo momma is so old… she knew the Great Wall of China when it was only good! Yo momma is so old… that her bus pass is in hieroglyphics! Yo momma is so old… she was wearing a Jesus starter jacket! Yo momma is so old… her birth certificate is in Roman numerals. Yo momma is so old… she ran track with dinosaurs. Yo momma is so old… she knew Burger King while he was still a prince. Yo momma is so old… her birth certificate says expired on it. Yo momma is so old… she has a picture of Moses in her yearbook. Yo momma is so old… that when she was in school there was no history class. Yo momma is so old… her social security number is 1! Yo momma is so old… I told her to act her own age, and she died. Yo momma is so short… Yo momma is so short… she does backflips under the bed. Yo momma is so short … she can play handball on the curb. Yo momma is so short… she can use a sock for a sleeping bag. Yo momma is so short… she can tie her shoes while standing up. Yo momma is so short… she can sit on a dime and swing her legs. Yo momma is so short … she has to use a ladder to pick up a dime. Yo momma is so short … she poses for trophies! Yo momma is so short… she has a job as a teller at a piggy bank. Yo momma is so short… she has to use rice to roll her hair up. Yo momma is so short… she uses a toothpick as pool stick. Yo momma is so short… she can surf on a popsicle stick.

Throughout the year we worked at maintaining and painting the vessels secured at the Academy waterfront. The school had lifeboats, running boats, sailboats, a wooden-hulled “Submarine Chaser” and the “Training Ship.” During the years that I was at the Academy, most of these ships and boats, being holdovers from World War II, were hardly new. They were in constant need of maintenance and repair, which, of course, fell to us midshipmen. Most of the other academies had the funding to hire a permanent maintenance staff, but not us. At MMA we took pride in what we did and we were the ones who took care of almost everything. Every winter, for all the years that I was at Maine Maritime Academy, we sailed from Castine, Maine, to the warm waters of the Caribbean in January. In The Tricks End, our yearbook, the Caribbean was called our third home. It gave us something to look forward to, and it gave us the practical, seagoing training we needed to become officers in the United States Maritime Service.

school yearbook, they were

Emira realized that Briar probably didn’t know how to say good-bye because she’d never had to do it before. But whether she said good-bye or not, Briar was about to become a person who existed without Emira. She’d go to sleepovers with girls she met at school, and she’d have certain words that she’d always forget how to spell. She’d be a person who sometimes said things like, “Seriously?” or “That’s so funny,” and she’d ask a friend if this was her water or theirs. Briar would say good-bye in yearbook signatures and through heartbroken tears and through emails and over the phone. But she’d never say good-bye to Emira, which made it seem that Emira would never be completely free from her. For the rest of her life and for zero dollars an hour, Emira would always be Briar’s sitter.

I was high school yearbook kind of pretty, not the kind of beautiful that made men crazy.

Your friends become your tormentors. Although, come on, they’re not bullying you, you just can’t take a joke! The psychological warfare puts Putin to shame. One day you come into school and you say hi to your supposed friends, but, overnight they’ve been discussing how terrible you are behind your back and are now freezing you out without admitting that’s what they’re doing. So they’ll go for lunch without you but say they forgot. Or you’ll be walking home and they’ll all just randomly run off and leave you there, laughing, pretending it’s ok. A female friendship group will then hold a little “committee,” telling their chosen victim, in grown-up voices, everything that’s wrong with them as a person and how nobody wants to be their friend anymore, and…why are you crying? We’re just trying to be honest, jeez. Year Nine. We should all get a special medal and six month of counseling on the NHS.

I’m sure, behind closed doors, there was more to them. I’m sure they were complex and 3D and flawed, with their own complicated life stories interwoven with pain like everyone else. But you know what? I couldn’t care less about that. Because I never saw it. Nobody at school ever saw anything by the gloss and the bullying.

It seemed impossible, so I began seeking information. I talked with my mother. I went to visit my former first grade teacher. I started looking at a few yearbooks and reading old newspapers. I talked informally with some CCTS graduates. The comments were remarkably similar.

Their strong appearances of disinterest were unnerving in contrast with the old CCTS yearbook pictures of African American children involved in debating, drama, literacy clubs, and so forth.