Crap-booking

In high school, I had the most awesome. English. Teacher. EVER. Her name was Susie Baruffi, and she was young and hip and treated us like we had some sense - while simultaneously not taking any of our crap. And best of all, she introduced her classes to the concept of daybooks: blank books in which we journaled, pasted pictures from magazines and news headlines, and wrote down random thoughts and quotes. Pretty much like a scrapbook, although less "cutesy" (no page layouts or embellishments, just random stuff). Keep in mind, this was in like 1230 B.C. (or maybe it was 1995 or so), before the whole scrapbooking craze hit - so really, it was ahead of its time. Revolutionary.

Thanks to my daybooks - which I kept religiously from about sophomore year on - I have a hilarious chronicle of my high school life. Such as my obsessive adolescent love for Marilyn Manson, who at the time was a relative newcomer to the music scene. (If you can read my handwriting, you'll see that I was excited that he spit on my arm during a concert. Good times.)

Or the immortal pieces of crap that I taped to its pages. Like the mercury my lab partners and I whipped up in chemistry class (shoutouts to Beth and Jenn, if you're reading this!). And a piece of chicken fried rice, the same dish that I ate everysingleday when I drove my best friend Betsy to her after-school job at Wang's Chinese - complete with a lengthy running commentary by both Betsy and me:

And the Beavis and Butthead spinoff cartoon I drew, featuring Betsy and myself and a partial photo of the Butthead pinata I made in Spanish class (that's the thing to the right of the TV).

I was such an angelic child. Notice I'm not the one with the cigarette. Or the horns. Take that, Betsy's-mom-who-still-hates-me-because-I-was-a-bad-influence.

*ahem*

Anyway, over the years I amassed an impressive collection of eleven daybooks, each full of the snippets and tidbits that made up my adolescence and young adulthood. So you would think that I'd be the kind of woman who scrapbooks, right? That my kids would also have a detailed account of their births and toddler years?

Well ... not so much. I tried scrapbooking, but after years of doing daybooks, I found it too prissy and orderly for me. And so I stopped. And although my kids have the requisite baby books with blanks for their names, birth weights, milestones, etc., there's not much in them.

That's why I'm so glad I have my blog. It will be around forever ... Google willing. And how else would I remember that on December 10th, 2009, I found Colin "cleaning the snot" out of his nose ... with his brother's toothbrush?