It started with a class project. The scrapbooks as they originally existed. There were five albums total, all with essays and/or captions. Truthfully, it started with a trip to Europe in the summer of 1994--between my junior and senior years of high school--because if not for that trip, I wouldn't have had any pictures to …
Category: Personal Archaeology
Personal Archaeology 25: Pictures You Never Took of Things That Are No Longer There
It's September 11, which means that my social media feeds have more than one commemorative status. They're not as abundant this year as they were last year, which marked 20 years since the attacks, so I didn't find myself facing as many eagles, flags, and "Never Forget" posts as usual. That's made scrolling a little …
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Personal Archaeology 24: Awarded for Showing Up
Want to know a little secret? At one point, I received a participation trophy. Actually, it wasn't just one trophy. I used to have multiple participation trophies. I know, right? I'm from the tail end of Generation X. I'm not a Millennial. They're the ones who were constantly given reinforcement, handed trophies for just showing …
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Personal Archaeology 23: Work
Yes, that is my badge from when I worked at Marshalls for 3 months in the fall of 1994. Yes, I still have it. So I have probably been watching too many teacher complaining and teacher quitting TikToks lately, which I can't say is the most healthy thing, especially considering how exhausted I have been …
Personal Archaeology 22: On College, Philosophy, Love, Friendship, and Acceptance
So I have been part of a listserv for My So-Called Life fandom for 20 years. The emails flowed from a trickle to a complete stop years ago when a number of us shifted over to social media or moved on altogether, but back in October, it sprang to life again for a little while. …
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Personal Archaeology 21: Unexpected Moments of Normal
The last two of my journals, which chronicled my junior and senior years of high school. I've been trying to figure out how to write this post, because once I finish it, I will be completely done going back through the paper notebook journals from junior high and high school. They began sometime in the …
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Personal Archaeology 20: The Relationship, The Old Girlfriend, and the End of the Paper Trail
I don't know the exact date that Kate and I officially broke up, but it was 25 years ago right before I was about to head off to my sophomore year college, and while I know that the end of our relationship caused me an enormous amount of pain, I barely wrote about it in …
Personal Archaeology 19: Applied
"Erika 9 typewriter" by shordzi is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 I'm helping my seniors with their Common Application essays in my AP Lit class. This is, I fully admit, one of my favorite things about the beginning of the school year. It's an assignment that helps me get to know them but also lets me put on my …
Personal Archaeology 18: That One Summer
Part of my 1994-1995 scrapbook project. At left: an essay about being in Paris. At right: a page of all of us taking pictures of each other taking pictures at the top of The Arc De Triomphe. Among the three notebooks (and several folders of MS Word files) I have left from my personal journal …
Personal Archaeology 17: When I Was A Teacher Blogger
On my phone, there's a screencap from an old Innovative Educator post that begins "The unspoken truth about teaching writing in school is that few people doing so are writers themselves."* The first two paragraphs of the post I screencapped. I removed distinguished characteristics of the blog, but you can Google all of this to …
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The Uncollecting 