God bless my mother's tendency to hoarde things. The other day she brought over an incredibly insightful bag of junior high nostalgia: pictures, artwork and hold on to your catholic school-issued plaid ... my NOTES!
The notes I took in World History?
Um. No.
She saved my entire collection of passed notes labeled 7th Grade and 8th Grade respectively.
I clearly felt that these exchanges were of uber import. Needless to say, I sat rather quietly with a glass of wine whilst inspecting these carefully-organized adolescent scrawlings.
It only took an hour to make some solid observations about these communications drafted by thirteen and fourteen year-olds.
For your reading pleasure, I have included a few candid photos. These were taken with my very basic kid-cam that I received for Christmas in seventh grade. Please note the bangs, the cousins and awkwardness of it all.
Dear tweens and freshly-dubbed teens, I have some advice to give so that the thirty-five year-old version of yourself may be somewhat impressed with you twenty years from now:
1) Stop telling everyone how bored you are all the time. Examples: "This class is so boring. I am sooooooooo BORED it's not even funny."
We get it, you feel the need to explain that you would not have been compelled to write a note absent extreme boredom. That simple fact is implied in note-writing itself. Skip mentioning this fact. And, remember, you must have interests to be interesting.
2) Stop apologizing for brevity. Examples: "Sorry this is so short" or S/S/S and "I would have written more but ..." Keep these things to yourself.
I can assure you that the person receiving the note will not feel slighted by your pithy commentary until you point out how much time you spent writing to someone else.
3) Get to the fucking point, kids. Per the foregoing, I must say my collection of notes contained lengthy expositions and equally verbose closings.
From a sheer productivity standpoint, you could have written ten times as many notes and learned algebra in the same time it took you to write one senseless message.
Example: "I'd write more, but I have to go. My mom wants me to finish my book report two days early and I want to watch the new episode of 21 Jump Street. Richard Grieco is on tonight."
Arguably, this is an important bit of information. They gave the guy his own show for Pete's sake.
4) End your quest to find clever new ways to misspell words. Trust me, "Wutz up?" "welps or whelps" "geeez" "cuz" and "luv" look a little bit stupid two decades later written on paper. We will discuss texting in a moment.
5) Keep the Top 5 lists coming. These are incredibly entertaining. When you save these notes, please categorize them by grade and author and include a yearbook. It really helps jog the memory years later in relating names to faces frozen in time. Future you will not care about bordem, new-fangled spellings or the reason the note is so short. Top 5 lists are exciting!
6) Please include a legend for your closing acronyms. b/f/f and w/b are easy ones. Then there are a number of others: G/F/A. F.I.T.E. F/F U/B/G/F/A
A few other observations:
Girls are very good at expressing every single feeling they have, when they feel it.
Boys are ... not so much.
Sixth grade girls are meanest. Seventh is brutal. Eighth grade seems to soften them a bit.
Sixth, seventh and eighth grade boys wish the girls would stop fighting and let them touch their boobs. Or see their boobs. Or just have boobs, actually.
Do kids even write notes anymore? Or do they just text in class? In which case, this is more of a data storage issue than a folder of handwritten missives.
Either way, I will keep my collection, at least until Leighton and Mairin are old enough to write their own. Junior high seems rougher now in hindsight. I just want to be grounded, prepared and sympathetic for when that day comes.
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