August 26, 2009
blast from the past
On a whim I got out my high school senior yearbook last night, mostly because I had this niggling thought that I forgot who our Prom king and queen were and it was bothering me. I ended up reading it from cover to cover, including the notes that everyone writes to each other at the end of the year. Wow, what a trip back down memory lane. There are so many people I’ve never even thought about since we graduated, lots of people I’ve forgotten even though their names were commonplace 4 years ago. Friends who wrote “keep in touch!” w/ their phone number, but whom I haven’t talked to since. All the pictures of life in high school bring back fond memories: pep rallies, Student Council banner painting sessions, blowing bubbles from the balcony during Ms. Nic’s AP Lang class, and the countless times we dressed up for Spirit Days (I was a ninja turtle, Harry Potter, Roman citizen, pirate, nerd….the list goes on). That’s probably one of the biggest things I miss about high school, the school spirit that couldn’t help but make you excited for Friday and getting decked out in black and gold. Sure, Princetonians have school pride, but that’s mainly because of our status at the top of US New’s Best Colleges list. We don’t dress up weekly en masse in orange and black, paint our faces and go rampaging around campus screaming at the top of our lungs. That’s what happens at big state schools like U of M or IU. Sigh…I miss that sense of excitement.
And me…I looked pretty different back then too. My hair! I didn’t remember it being sooooo long, but there’s this one pic in the yearbook of me and another girl with hair down to our butts. We both donated a foot to Locks of Love. Also, I think I was chubbier…or at least my face was. I’d like to think I look better now than I did 4 years ago.
I guess the overall sentiment I was left with after I finished flipping through (it took me 2 hours!) was: Wow, I miss high school!! I wonder if looking through our Princeton yearbook (do we have one?) 4 years later will bring me the same sense of nostalgia. Probably not, but I mean that in a good way. Relationships and experiences are different in college, less cohesive in general, but the ones that matter are much deeper and more meaningful. And it’s cliche I know, but there’s a loss of the innocence we had in high school. The real world seems so much closer now.
If only we could stay forever young.
