The season is upon us. Once again the school year is coming to a close, which brings summer vacation for teachers and students, and logistical nightmares for working parents (HOW IS FROZEN SING-ALONG CAMP BOOKED UP ALREADY OH GOD WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO?).
For those in high school, the end of the academic year also provides the payoff to a months-old investment: the yearbook. Once those books came into our possession, the first thing we did (after frantically pawing to the page you’re on to make sure there wasn’t some mystery speckle on your face- seriously, what was with that? Every year some poor soul had that camera lens alien face hugger thing that looked like an amoeba attached to their cheek) was begin the pursuit of signatures.
The yearbook signature meant so much. It was a way to convey genuine sentiment, one last callback to a semester-long running joke, or a landing pad for informational bombshells. No matter what you used the space for, one thing was for sure: it was probably dumb.
Here are ten of the dumbest things we used to write in each others’ yearbooks.
“KIT”
Shorthand for “Keep in Touch”, the KIT acronym spent most of the 90s sprinkled across our yearbooks’ inside covers. It also served as a totes casual way to drop your digits into your signature, a nonchalant move that took the entire year and measurable amounts of sweat to build the courage for.
“Don’t change.”
Seriously- stay awkward, self conscious and graceless your whole life. And if you could be a peach and keep wearing that Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt into adulthood that would be super.
“Don’t read this until you get home.”
Yeah right, that worked all the time. “Don’t read this until you get home” was code for HIGHLY SENSITIVE AND UNNECESSARILY DRAMATIC HIGH SCHOOL SHIT ENCLOSED. Nine times out of ten, the recipient ducked around the closest corner, onto the nearest idling school bus or into a lavatory stall to read that note on the quick. Hope it wasn’t anything too embarrassing, because asking them to wait until they got home to read it was like setting a punch bowl of Cocoa Puffs in front of Sonny and saying “Now DON’T freak out.”
“BFF”
Best friends forever! (*never sees person again)
A song lyric
No lyrics that appear in the KLF song 3 a.m. Eternal should be considered ‘words to live by’, but in the 90s there were more song lyrics draped across yearbook pages than there were “Co-Ed Naked Softball/Firefighting/Soccer/etc” t-shirts on Spring Breakers.
Game-changing confessions
The bottom left corner of the yearbook’s table of contents was not the place to reveal a 7 year-long crush you’ve had on someone since grade school, but we did it. And it usually turned out like this.
“Page me”
What a wonderful two-word time capsule that will forever symbolize an era in which we carried and paid for service on an electronic device that allowed us to receive requests for a call back and coded messages that we could not reply to.
Pagers belonged on doctors and drug dealers, not high school kids. Even though trading the detachable clip with someone to create a two-toned look was inarguably a bad ass move. WHAT IF THEY NEVER TRADED BACK?
“We should hang out”
If we haven’t spent time together outside of school by this point, the sand is almost out of the hourglass my friend. Er, I mean, “Yes, let’s!”.
“I hope your dreams come true”
Why would you hope that my bedroom was full of potting soil and I was stuck in the middle of Lake Huron in an Easter basket? OH THOSE DREAMS. Yeah, not much chance of me marrying Claudia Schiffer and playing for the Yankees in between NASA missions, but thanks for the kind words. I hope yours come true too.
Howie Decker (@HowardtheDeck) is the chief blogger and editor of UnderScoopFire, and has also written for Pajiba, Topless Robot, What Culture, and Pop Culture Zoo and is managing editor of Cool & Collected – The Magazine for Pop Culture Collectors.
This is embarrassingly awesome. I also remember kids who signed in the “crack” & thought they were witty…they were not.
My high school would hand out yearbooks at the start of the next school year. So your entire senior year, including graduation pictures, are all in the same yearbook. Makes sense but now I have an untouched un autographed senior yearbook.
So many memories! I got a lot of “Don’t change” in my yearbooks, but man, am I glad I didn’t listen!
Honorable mention goes to the inside jokes you’re so sure you’ll always remember. In reality, years later, you look at those and think, “WTF?!?”