Live life in the moment

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/06/2023 (1216 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A few months ago, when I turned 38, I received an unexpected and delightful birthday gift from my parents who were cleaning out the basement: an elaborate birthday card, handmade by my best friend and signed by as many people as she could find, for my 18th birthday.

Receiving that card again, exactly 20 years later to the day, made me feel a lot of things (including old). But mostly it made me feel grateful, since I am still besties with that bestie, even though she now lives an ocean away.

I texted her a photo of the card — an act that would have been unfathomable when we were teenagers — and she wrote back, “I love that we have that history. I’m keeping you around forever.” BFFs are real, kids.

This month marks 20 years since I graduated from Kelvin High School so I’m currently mired in nostalgia. (I just checked and I am still not listed in Notable Alumni on Wikipedia; it looks like you have to be a former NHL player or Fred Penner to make the cut.)

Twenty years is a span of time that feels like both a blink and a chasm; I can’t believe it’s been 20 years but also I absolutely can believe it’s been 20 years. For one, tech from 2003 looks absolutely ancient. This was the era of burned CDs, and flip phones and proto-texting — where r u?

I got my first cellphone in Grade 12 and it was usually dead in the bottom of my backpack, so foreign was the idea of carrying around a phone.

But I do have a physical record of that time. A few summers ago, I rediscovered a perfect little high school time capsule that I must have assembled for myself during one of the Great Purges. It’s small, but it has everything: the baby pink guitar pick I wore, poser-like, around my neck (once I mastered the power-chord oeuvre of Green Day, I abandoned the Yamaha I got for Christmas in Grade 10).

The first phone number I received from a boy, which, in a nice little memory two-fer, was written on the back of a reorder form from my first job.

The collages, constructed from photos of bands cut out of Spin magazine and packing tape, that adorned my agenda planner.

In a nice bit of symmetry, the English class project in which we had to create an archive for a literary character. Mine, Bridget Jones’s Scrapbook, received “10 mark units out of 10.”

The Pearl Jam patch I stapled to everything — including to the satin evening bag I brought to grad because heaven forbid that four to six hours should elapse in which someone, somewhere, didn’t know I was a fan.

I’m glad I have this stuff. It’s nice, every so often, to revisit that girl from ’03. She wore long-sleeved shirts under short-sleeved ones as was the custom for Girls Who Liked Music at the time. She had the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army on infinite repeat, while CNN did the same with the War on Terror. It was a weird year to graduate from high school.

In her Culture Study newsletter, Anne Helen Petersen mused in a piece called Archiving Your Teen Self that her own teen years, which dovetailed with mine, “are so much more vivid to me than my late 20s or 30s, which passed with so little physical trace.”

Petersen points out that all the stuff we currently create — our text exchanges, our screenshots, our emails, our Instagram stories — are ephemeral. They cannot be kept in a shoebox or a dusty Rubbermaid to delight and remind later.

To wit: most of the music journalism I did in the mid-2000s to early 2010s, a giant chunk of my career, has been wiped from the Internet.

The sentimental kids in the class of 2023 will have a different archival system than we did, to be sure. And I will note that the physical archive I kept for myself is not unlike a ruthlessly curated Instagram highlight reel, only I can hold it.

But I wonder if elder millennial memories of high school feel more vivid than those of our more online 20s and 30s, not just because we left behind physical, tangible evidence of them, but because we were actually inside our experiences. We lived offline. We weren’t actively documenting things as they were happening, save for a few disposable camera snaps if someone remembered to take them and also have them developed; the archive is incidental.

There was no smartphone pulling our attention away. If you were hanging out with your friends, that’s what you were doing. If you were at a show, you couldn’t take a bunch of blurry concert videos you’d never watch again. If you were bored, you could daydream or pass a note in class or doodle in a margin and then keep that scrap of paper to laugh about 20 years later. But mostly, you had to be where you were, for better or worse.

So to the class of 2023 — also a weird year to graduate from high school! — I will relay some good advice I got before my wedding day: remember to take a few minutes to be where you are, wherever that is. Stop and soak it in because you’ll never be back there again.

Or, in the words of one of the most famous high school students ever committed to film, words that have been quoted in high school yearbooks ever since: ”Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com

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