Public Service

So I promised updates and I lied.

Blame MSN. Eiffel towers and cardinal sins.

Well I thought I would blog about my party (I didn't) but this is just more compelling. Tragedy is always more compelling.

This is today's tragedy.

What is it? It's our bloody yearbook.

Kind of late, isn't it? Already April, and now they decide to drop it. Well all the better. If they came up to us and handed us this while we were still in school, I would have killed them.

Of course, although I say "they" I'm not sure who exactly to blame for this mess... yet.

Well, let's start from the top.

Okay personally, I kinda like the way this page looks. I mean, if you stand really far back and sort of squint a little, it almost looks like a celebrity feature in a magazine.

Really far back.

Peako had a lot to say about this particular page though (along with the rest of the magazine). Doesn't it say loads about my writing style when I find out about this thing at seven, go online at eight and still not have a post up by midnight?

It's midnight now.

Even Peako finished his post. And I only told him about it at eleven or so.

Hell Hath No Fury Like The Class Of 2007.

His rant today is of course, perfectly justified.

You know how they say that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters forever would eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare?

Well I'm guessing the school tried a similar experiment here. Only using monkeys with Photoshop. Or maybe Microsoft Word. It sure looks more like the latter. I'm not exactly sure what they were trying to produce here.

Something half decent, maybe?

Looks like we're going to need more monkeys.

Hands up those of you who can actually make out the words "Clubs and Societies" in the above picture. It looks like one of those colorblind tests you'd expect to find at a hospital. I mean, white on white?

Oh and by the way, this is just one amongst the many title pages in the book. And they all look like they belong on the wall of a physician's waiting room. I remember how we used to have simple titles, with just a simple drawing or two. What happened to that? I miss them already.

Why in the name of good taste would you ever stretch a photograph you're planning to print? Have you ever seen them do it in TIME? Playboy maybe? No?

Then WHY THE HELL WOULD YOU DO IT?

She's short, we get it already. You don't have to make it worse. You stretched like half the pictures in here and didn't even have the decency to keep the proportions straight. And I guess none of you have ever heard of dots-per-inch either. What were you using? A camera phone?

And I guess you hate words. Why do you hate words? One of my siblings mentioned that the official explanation given for the almost complete castration of text from the yearbook was because "no one reads it anyway".

I'm sorry. Did I hear that right? No one reads it anyway so no more words? No more poems, no more stories and no more reports? Because no one reads it anyway? What planet are you from?

Get your head out of your ass and pay attention.

I usually don't make that big a deal about it when you mess up. Well, there was the concert. But that was just one time. But you don't just do something like this to our yearbook and expect to get away with it. This isn't some bi-weekly rag no one cares about that we're talking about here.

The school prints these once a year. But for students... we get the chance to be seniors once in a lifetime. And we were supposed to have the chance to design this ourselves. To properly immortalize the time of our lives within these pages.

You can't imagine what that might feel like? We were looking for something we could hold on to for the rest of our lives. We were hoping to be able to flip through these pages at sixty and feel the memories come rushing back.

How was this supposed to help?

You somehow managed to screw up what little text you did see fit to include. So how did you do it? Did you play spin-the-bottle with colors and themes? Maybe Russian Roulette would have been a better choice. I hear it's a lot more fun fully loaded.

Oh and Esmonde looks like a pedophile. Bet he really appreciates that.

You wanna know what i hate most? Guess. It's not that hard. I'll even throw you a couple of clues.

Number one. It's something we worked on for almost two entire years.

Number two. It's something you asked for, and received, complete documentation on. I should know. The folder for the report was thicker than your sorry excuse of a yearbook.

I can't believe we only got one page. I didn't actually spot it the first time I flipped through. I blinked. Same with the Leo, same with the Prefects. Don't we deserve more?

For as long as I can remember, if you were a board member in a club, you'd get your name in the yearbook. Which is the way it should be. How did we manage to end up the first year ever without the ghost of a mention as to who the President of the club even was?

No roll call for the committee.

Not even a picture of the club and its members.

You made us look like we had one fucking project. What's your excuse? Didn't you have enough pictures? We sent you tons. And with half the Editorial Board in the fucking club, forgive me if I fail to see why you weren't motivated enough to maybe work a little harder on your own club's page.

You couldn't even get the color of the badge right?

At least Leo were better represented in the photographs. At least you can see the club and the board.

Don't we deserve it at all? We raised thirty thousand dollars this year. I guess no one's ever going to know about that now. No one's ever going to remember the Famine, or I.U. Day, or the World Cup, or any other project we've ever done.

Why us?

You never did this to any of our seniors. And we gave you the results you wanted. We were perfect and they'll be chasing our record forever.

You even screwed up the class pages we spent weeks agonizing over. Maybe the new orientation doesn't allow for more a traditional view of the pages. It doesn't mean you have to stick them so you have to turn the fucking page to see the other half of your class!

We wanted this to be good. Really we did.

If you needed help, why the hell didn't you ask for it? In the first place, why didn't you finish the yearbook last year, like a normal institution? Then maybe we could have worked on it instead. And then if it didn't turn out the way we liked we would have no one else to blame but ourselves.
But you had to go and hand it to... who? People who I'm guessing don't even really care what happens to the yearbook at the end of the day. It isn't their year. Why should they?

You could have just let us do it. We wanted to do it.

And now this is what we get to live with.

I guess if the yearbook was a joke, this would be the punch. The page devoted to chapel service features myself and Liwen (the Buddhists) prominently, while the actual Christians feature in little boxes near the margins of the page.

I guess that's ironic.

But I'm not laughing.