I am from upstate New York, but I currently live in central Florida.   During the summer months, you can set your watch by the daily severe thunderstorm.   Yesterday, we had a power outage while I was at work, but it was back on by the time I arrived home.  A few hours after dinner, it went out again, even though the weather had cleared.  No big deal, it wasn’t oppressively hot inside.  Yet.  The power came back on quickly and everyone went about their business.

I have come to realize that my power company, or at least the section of the power grid I live on, is very fickle.  It seems that with the slightest bit of poor weather, I am inevitably setting the clock on my microwave a few hours later.  Today though, the power went out again, even though it was a beautiful day.  My wife decided to head to the grocery store, and the other kids were out and about.  As I sat in the living room, burning through my cell phone data allotment, I looked up and something caught my eye.  My yearbooks.

I used to keep the yearbooks along with old photos and albums inside an ottoman we have.  A while back I took them out and put them on the bookshelf next to my TV.  There they sat.  Until today.

I pulled out the first two yearbooks I ever had.  The 1989 5th grade book, and the 1990 sixth grade.  There is plenty of material in all the books to write several posts, so I will only review two of them tonight.  The first thing I did was open the front cover and begin to look at the signatures and notes I received as we would trade yearbooks in the cafeteria and between class.  The first note reads:

So, Jeffrey (last name redacted) immediately wanted me to have an awful life.  What you probably can’t tell by this without some context is that Jeffrey was just being funny. But this shows you what a-holes 10 year old boys can be.  By the way, Jeffrey turned out to be an a-hole.  So, draw your own conclusion.

I continue scanning through the inside cover and I come across this:

Wow.  In the first 30 seconds of reading my yearbook I have people wishing me an awful life and a boring summer.  This note was from Leo, and I have no problems with it.  I’ll tell you why.  First of all, Leo was, and still is, a hell of a nice guy.  I really like the spelling error in “buthole.”  The spelling error is surprising, since there is one thing 10 year old kids, at least a my school, were good at:swearing.  True, butthole is not a true curse word, but it is close enough in its written form.  Also, Leo only wished me a boring summer, not an awful life.  Let’s keep thumbing through the pages.

I quickly skim through the actual pages of the book, where teachers have written notes next to their picture.  One note that cracks me up, and I don’t have a picture of it for you, is my 5th grade teacher telling me I have a great sense of humor but “don’t let it get you into trouble.”  We’re all adults now, so I will translate that for you: “Hey, you’re a smartass, and I can see it getting worse as you get older.”  Well she was right.  However, I now have a knack for sarcasm that has been documented since 1989 and has been perfected over 2 decades.

My yearbook wasn’t completely full of written wishes of doom and gloom.  There were a few funny ones in there.   There were also some well wishes.  Here is one:

Yes he meant “our” instead of “are” but lets analyze this.   I remember who Mike is.  We are no longer friends, but we were in middle in high school.  What makes this note stick out to me is I have no idea what team he is talking about.  It could have been something in gym class, because I don’t remember him playing little league.  I racked my brain on this one and really tried to think of what he was talking about, but I’m clueless.  I assume it was some gym thing, but if it was, why wouldn’t we be on the same team anymore?  Lost memory I guess.  Moving on.

I saved this note for last.  This note was written by Loren.  I vaguely remember him, so I can’t tell you anything about him.  I can tell you that it seems he was genuinely nice at the time, wishing me well and hoping I have a “nice teacher next year.”

But read the post closely, and you will see some social clues.  I picked up on this almost immediately, and it only made me realize again, that I live in a different era then when I grew up.  He uses the words “awesomely bogus.”  The two words seem to contradict one another, because we look back at bogus as meaning “bummer” or “that sucks.”  What I think he meant to say was have an “awesomely radical” summer. At the time though, and I didn’t remember this until I really thought about this note, we used the words “rad” and “bogus” interchangeably.  I would attribute that to the fact that we were 10 years old, and using slang that was being used by the older teenage kids.    Maybe I’m over analyzing, but that’s my theory.

This one note is a time capsule.  It shows the slang of the day.  I haven’t pointed it out yet, but look at the “equation” on the left hand side:

I don’t know if this took off at other schools, but this showed up in yearbooks for a few years at my school.  Loren was telling me I would never be forgotten.  Because I was too cool to be.  Nice.

I’m sure if I showed this to my 11 year old daughter, she would roll her eyes at it, but hey, it was the language of my time.  Maybe I will show her and let you know what her reaction is.

As I went to put the yearbook down, a picture caught my eye. It was on the very last page.  It is a picture of someone with a monster mask on, probably on Halloween.  What caught my eye though, and gave me a chuckle, was what they did to the picture.  Back in the 80’s and 90’s, when you still had to get film developed, someone came up with the idea of stickers in the shape of comic strip bubbles that you could put on the picture.  These were very popular at the time, but there was no customization.  The stickers came already printed with quips on them.  What did the sticker on this photo read?  But of course…