In case anyone was harboring any doubts about the depth and breadth of my nerdiness, I present to you Exhibit A: The Binder I Had In Seventh Grade. I threw this out the last time I visited my mom, but felt strangely compelled to create a digital archive.
Annotations, from above left:
I remember being very excited to find the heart sticker with my name in it. Despite the fact that now I know approximately a million Saras, in the eighties, it was rare to encounter any name-related ephemera spelled sans H.
Lord of the Rings sticker. I was in a fan club. There were newsletters. This was — okay, it wasn’t before Orlando Bloom was born, but it was, you know, years before Peter Jackson even made Meet the Feebles.
Sandra Boynton elephant. Did you know she has designed over four thousand greeting cards? I didn’t either.
Why, yes, WHYT was a Top 40 station, why do you ask? It would be ninth grade before I discovered WCBN.
Gandalf for President. Edited to add, in proto-anarchism (that would come in ninth grade, too): “Or Nobody.”
Cheshire Cat sticker.
Giant Ghostbusters sticker.
Great American Smokeout sticker. They gave these out at school. I think we were supposed to go home with them and tell our parents to stop smoking, since in seventh grade, very few of us had taken it up.
Powdermilk Biscuits postcard. Sigh. I would listen to the show sometimes with my dad.
Shiny foil musical note rainbow sticker. Because it was very important to reinforce one’s essential musicality with representations of musical notes.
Shiny foil rainbow unicorn sticker. (What was it with shiny foil stickers? I do not know, except that they were shiny, and also foil.)
There are some traces of yet other stickers, the nature of which are lost to memory.
Tell me something about your seventh grade year? Or Year Seven, as the case may be.
sara z.
June 12, 2009 at 4:39 pmSomething about my seventh grade year: I’d just moved from San Francisco to Pacifica. It was a new school for me and all new people. I quickly realized it was very important to have Levi 501s and Vans. I got one pair of each. I also realized it was important to like Van Halen and Def Leppard, rather than The Gap Band and America and show tunes.
I listened to Alex Bennett on Live 105 every morning. He always had stand-up comedians on that were actually funny, instead of radio personalities who wanted to be stand-up comedians.
Soon I made a friend and we’d climb the tree near school and smoke Camels we’d sneak from her dad’s pack.
Sara
June 14, 2009 at 9:09 pmIt was important to have Forenza everything in my seventh grade. I’m not sure I ever knew what music it was important to like. I heard American Top 40 for the first time while on a field trip to hear the handbell choir at another church. It was deeply odd to hear both When Doves Cry and That’s All for the first time in my handbell teacher Mrs. Jellinek’s car.
Jeff C.
June 17, 2009 at 12:21 pmI took an old orange baseball cap and wrote “A-Team” on it.
The cool kids were all wearing I-Zod. I wrote a short story about a movie quoting super-hero/private detective named “X-Factor”…way before Marvel ripped of that title.