You painted me in pastel

During the winter break of my second year of college, mushy craft-maker that I am, I decided it would be a good idea to put together a scrapbook of my college years. Scrappy would become a member of the small collection of items that I possess that exist for the sole purpose of inciting future decades of moony nostalgia.

As soon as I settled on the project, I made the weirdly calculated executive decision to compile my scrapbook as I went along on my college career (putting together pages for the fall '07 semester during the '07 winter break, pages for spring semester during summer, etc.) instead of going the more logical route of setting pictures aside, waiting for alumni-status, and then tackling the project when I had the full range of pictures at my disposal. Reason being, foresighted oracle that I am, I figured that over the course of four years, some of my friendships would wane, priorities would shift, emotions would robototize. If I waited until after senior year to put Scrappy together, I'd lose the of-the-moment sense of how each year felt to me at the time. Someone who meant the world to me freshman year might be the victim of a mass Facebook de-friending by April 2009 and not make it into Linda2010's scrapbook at all. Even if I lost contact with every single person who lived in my first year dorm floor, I'd still appreciate the humor in having made a circa-2007 scrapbook page, filled with hearts and stars, reading MUNSELL 5 4EVR!!!

Besides, I'm always impatient to play with glue and scissors.

The obvious downside of this sort of memory-making strategy is that you very well may end up with two full-spread Scrappy pages dedicated to the eternal loyalty and love that existed between you and a friend who would, a year and a half later, sleep with your girlfriend, poison your cat, and wreck your car before transferring to a school in Ontario. You kind of have to bank on the assumption that you're good at choosing friends.

For those of us who subscribe to the make-as-you-go mindset, though, the risks hardly matter, because the underlying values are innate to us. However my circumstances change, I think it's at the very least interesting, if not important, to remember the past as it was lived, full of embarrassing moments and flawed choices, rather than through the revisionist goggles of your hindsight-endowed current self. I'm not one for ripping pages out of diaries or cutting off the left sides of pictures.

Of course, I consequently tend to be a little put off when I find myself in social relationships with page-rippers or picture-cutters, not only for the dissonance in perspective, but also for the uncomfortable realization that there's a fair chance that, someday, I might unwittingly find myself Eternal Sunshine'd out of their lives.