Of Pencils, Books and Teachers’ Dirty Looks
Joelle said in the early morning on July 23, 2007
Back-to-school time is nostalgic for me. Of course, I take joy in the fact that kids are all going back to school and won’t be loitering around playing grab-ass anymore (wow, I sound like my Dad), but mostly, the back-to-school sales, advertisements and such remind me of a hopeful, exciting time: the start of the new school year, when anything is possible and there’s a chance you might not be a complete peon anymore.
While most teenagers gripe about school, I really loved it. Granted, I did well in my classes, so I spent my spare time coming up with creative ways to get out of actually going to class, instead ditching to go sit in on the jazz ensemble classes my choir director was leading. Yes, I ditched class to go sing in a choir. I’m so punk rock. Anarchy, etc.
Anyway, I digress. Back-to-school was always a time I could daydream about the possibilities of the year to come. Is chemistry going to suck? Will the snobby girl be nicer this year? Will Chris whats-his-face ask me to “go with him”? (And really, where did we think we were going? No one drove and I wasn’t allowed to date.)
Starting around 11-years-old until I was actually 17, I bought the August issue of Seventeen magazine every year and read it cover to cover. I would sit in my windowsill at night and flip through each page carefully, dog-earing the pages that contained stuff I fancied and things I “definitely wanted”. I conjured images in my head of me wearing that skirt with those shoes and oh my god, I will just die if I don’t get that new Bonne Belle Lip Potion…
And school supplies? Oh! Nirvana! I loooooooooove school supplies. In fact, I love most office supplies. I don’t know what that’s about, but I know I’m not alone. And school supplies were extra special. Your binder spoke volumes about you — what bands you listened to, what cliques you belonged to (if any — I didn’t really. I was the Every Girl™ )… if you were cool in elementary school, you had a Trapper Keeper. If you were even cooler and a girl, you had a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper. The preferred choice in high school was any kind of plain binder you could scribble your undying love for Michael Hutchence and Robert Smith all over. *cough* Not that I would know anything about that…
Back-to-school is upon us! What are your favorite back to school memories?
Moxie Design Studios™
from West Palm Beach, FL • Cocktail: Champagne Bellini
The smell of a brand new lunch box… and then the subsequent realization that you were so UNCOOL if you had a lunch box and brown bags were all the rage.
Also? My favorite thing was when we had to take all our new textbooks home and cover them in brown paper. Now kids have all these fancy ready made book covers you can get at Target. The first day home, I sat in the living room that night and covered all my books with brown paper grocery bags. I still remember how to do it.
Then you take it to school and doodle all over the damn thing. I heart Mike or Eric or Dan or Chris or whoever the crush of the week was.
Ha. I scoff at your Trapper Keeper. PeeChees were way cooler at my school.
And I agree with Kathy, I loved wrapping my books in brown paper grocery bags, and then writing all over them.
from San Diego, CA • Cocktail: slightly dirty Grey Goose martini
@kathy: Dude! I’d forgotten about the brown paper bag book covers. haha! I loved those, I could probably still do that blindfolded. Mine were always totally a mess by the end of the year.
from San Diego, CA • Cocktail: slightly dirty Grey Goose martini
@Tanya: PeeChees were high school for us. Elementary school was all about Trapper Keepers. In high school, we put our PeeChees in the binder. At least I did.
maybe i was weird.
New corduroy pants...and always thinking someone was walking behind me. And then I realized--it was my thighs rubbing together. Okay, not a good memory, but it’s the first thing that popped into my head.
I loved how I got all into buying new supplies--everything in order and new. By the end of the sememster--everything was shoved into half of a torn peechee folder and I carried a worn to the nub #2 pencil in my pocket. :D
from West Palm Beach, FL • Cocktail: Champagne Bellini
Am I the only person on earth who has never heard of PeeChee folders??
I have no clue what peechees are either.
I LOVE shopping for school supplies. I want to buy notebooks and folders and pens all the time.
I’ve never heard of PeeChees either.
The Husband and I were reminiscing about school supply shopping during our last trip to Target. Since when did they start putting out the school stuff in July? Anyway, now The Husband finds any excuse to go to our Office Depot. He’s a fileaholic-seriously.
from San Diego, CA • Cocktail: slightly dirty Grey Goose martini
Behold. The Pee-Chee folder.
from Michigan
OH! This is such a glorious time of year! I share the same love and nostalgia. I still roam through the Back To School aisle at Target....
I loved the day my mom would come home from supply shopping (for some reason we never went with her) and she would lay everything out on the floor in piles. My two sisters and I would then go around and get to pick what we wanted. Like, who got what color Trapper Keeper and stuff. Whoever went first in round one went last in round two, etc...good times.
I loved colored pens and those pencils with the little white lead things...I dont’ knwo what they’re called. But you write with it until the lead is gone, then you push the white part through the bottom revealing a lovely new lead on top. Top the whole thing off with an eraser cap and some cool design on it...and if you were lucky, it’d even smell like something.
Oh, the days....
And I think there was some federal law, where you had to change the little circle so it said “love is pee-chee but sex is an all season [s]port” and scribble over “folio.” Maybe that was just my school.
I loved those pencils with little white lead-carriers too. I don’t know what they were called, and I can’t even think how you would begin to google it.
I loved getting new clothes at the beginning of every school year. At the time I didn’t realize it, but I kind of got screwed because my birthday is also near the beginning of school, so my birthday present was always new back to school clothes. Except everyone else I knew got back to school clothes too! Whatever.
The strange thing for me is that since I never left school, back to school time is not an exciting time anymore. It’s more a time of dread now! But I do still love fall
I dreaded back-to-school because one summer my mother took a “Stretch & Sew” (does anyone else remember that?) class and thought she could just make everything for us. All the fabric was patterned stretchy t-shirt material. The worst outfit she made me was bright yellow/orange draw-string pants with a shirt that was horizontally striped with alternating lines of fire hydrants and dog bones. I think if I was a guy, I would’ve gotten my ass kicked. Every summer we had to go through this. We were so thankful when she got a job.
Tanya, we wrote that on our Pee-Chees too!
Seventeen and school supplies are at the top of my list. I went to Catholic school so we wore a uniform, but I would daydream over Seventeen each year. New notebooks, pens, pencils, etc. are still a favorite.
P.S. http://photodoto.com/ has some interesting articles on photography.
from Phoenix
I sorta dreaded going back to school, and hated hearing the adverts on telly/radio that would start reminding me; they usually started in July, and we didn’t even go back to school until the Tuesday after Labour Day.
Back in the day, what we all wanted were pencil crayons; they ruled !!
When I actually was IN school, I loved it, for the most part.
Never heard of PeeChees before this either.
Um, what’s this about wrapping your books? Huh? Our textbooks were au natural during my education.
from san diego, CA
My younger brother got his school supplies at
http://www.rockpaperpencils.com I have a stationery fetish so I couldn’t resist the Misfits Note Pad. Some pretty cool stuff -it’s worth checking out.