The teacher-appreciation letter I wrote to my adviser.

Mr. P,
     I got a notification on Facebook today—my friend Peter tagged me in a status where he quoted his cousin saying, “This has got to be the coolest yearbook I’ve ever seen, I wanna go into journalism next year!” Someone said that about my book…our book…after spending my whole high school life wishing I could influence someone like Keisha James influenced me freshmen year, maybe I finally did. Or maybe I didn’t, but the point is that I wouldn’t even have had the chance to do that if it wasn’t for you. Like I said in my editor’s note: I was overwhelmed by the amount of creative freedom you gave me with this book, and together we made it everything that I ever dreamed it would be! This book is going to be my high school legacy…thank you. Thank you so much for giving me this. I honestly believe that the success of this book may have changed my life somehow. I’ve always had trouble believing in myself - but I love this book, you love this book, the whole school loves this book, and this book was my beautiful brain baby. You helped make me a better, happier person, Mr. P, I dunno if I could ever thank you enough for that. 
     On a less sappy note, you also helped make for a very fun senior year, or at least as fun as it could be for an over-obsessed editor-in-chief. Sitting in your room working on the book was never boring. I’m gonna look back at this year and remember hysterically laughing at the pictures of Mrs. Montgomery doing yoga, hysterically laughing at the first draft of the gaming spread…I’ll always remember JJ’s personal chopsticks and Courtney asking if Korean was Asian and Owen & Austin slow-motion walking to “We Are Young”…and I’ll always remember that even when nothing interesting was happening, there was never a quiet moment because we spent a lot of time complaining (ha ha?) I’m really glad that most of my senior year was spent working on the yearbook and hanging out with you in room 204. I wouldn’t change a single thing about it if I could, except maybe I’d get rid of Shane…just kidding! Except I’m not. I wish you all the luck in the world with next year’s book, not that you really need it. You were the best adviser of them all.
                                                                                                                                   - Haley Hart

I’m graduating a week from tomorrow. I can hardly believe it. Some time between now and then, I’ll make a post of everything people wrote in my yearbook, just to give this disturbingly influencing era of my life some sort of proper send-off. A lot of people wrote about how impressed they were with the book, so it’s appropriate.

Now is as good a time as any to announce that my book is up for some sort of publication award for the first time in school history. I don’t know the specifics because it was something Mr. P brought up very quickly and we didn’t have a lot of time to talk today, but obviously I’m EXTREMELY EXCITED (TO THE POINT OF OBNOXIOUS BOLD/ITALICS/CAPITALS USE ALL AT ONCE) and I’ll give you guys all the details as soon as I know more!

I would like to apologize for various random posts — Tumblr has been posting things I reblog from my main blog onto my side-blogs…I don’t really know how to fix this issue, but I’m trying. I figure this is also an appropriate time to say, after graduation, I don’t know what’s going to happen to this blog since I won’t be on a yearbook staff anymore, but I still have a couple of weeks to think about it, so I’ll enlighten you guys then.

Distribution on Wednesday went smoothly. I didn’t post about it that night because I had to do gag award nonsense for band, on Thursday I had my A.P. Lit test and more gag award nonsense that kept me from getting home until around midnight, yesterday I had my last high school band concert, and today was my last band carwash and band picnic. I guess I mentioned all of that because at the picnic today, a bunch of parents came up to tell me how amazing they thought the book was. This isn’t totally related, but when I was in middle school my best-friend’s-boyfriend’s-mom drove me, my best friend, my best friend’s boyfriend, and the same extra two or three friends to every single jazz band gig we had (which was a lot), this woman knew me very personally, and today I told her goodbye when we left bc I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see her again, and she hugged me and said, “The yearbook is amazing…I’m so proud of you, you’ve really come out of your shell, kiddo.” It made me pretty happy. It kind of put a neat little bow on my whole high school life…to hear one of the people who knew me at the darkest point in my life tell me they’re proud of how much I’ve grown and changed since then, now that I’m about to graduate. It’s thanks to yearbook, thanks to high school band, some great teachers, my amazing friends…I feel like I’m ready to figure my life out now. Everything is about to come together, I’m gonna hear the click soon, I just know it.

It is Christmas Distribution Day Eve!
More people have already seen the book than I would have liked (outside of the staff), but the upside to that is that only one person has been unenthusiastic about the cover/theme (not even not that they disliked it, they just didn’t really care about it), and that has me feeling much more confident about what the general reaction will be tomorrow.
This will be my last of four Distribution Days, what has become literally my favorite day of the year, and my last event as a high school yearbook staff member, period. I almost can’t believe it. I’ll probably be a lot more sad when it’s all done and over with, but right now I’m just excited.

Here are some other things:

• My 10th-11th grade adviser came down from Minnesota this week bc her daughter was giving birth or something, and she finally made it to school today. It was after sixth period had ended though, so it was just Mr. P and I in the cave reorganizing the boxes of books after the class had spent the past hour checking them for damage. Let me interrupt myself to say that we’re distributing around 300 books on Wednesday and don’t resume selling until a week after that, so we just wanted to check those first 300 for now, and it would have been convenient to finish today, but we got through about half. Whatever. Okay, so, Mrs. David found Mr. P and I in the cave, and after hugs, she asked to see the book and was in awe of it, not to brag or anything. She really liked it. I told her she had to read my letter on the colophon, and it’s pretty long, and the part about my advisers is the second to last paragraph, so there was a lot of awkward standing around until this lovely woman picks her head up and there are tears streaming down her face in response to what I had written. A reminder: “Mrs. David, I miss you so much, but you deserve your happiness in Minnesota for so many reasons, one of them being that you gave me something I was skeptical I could have: this book as my own. You were also a wonderful friend to me, and someone I hope I know for the rest of my life. I will always cherish the words you wrote in my yearbook that first year, that I was your “secret weapon”. That drove me to be better, if only because I wanted to make you proud, which I hope I did.” She proceeded to tell me just how proud she really was of me, and what I accomplished, and it was one of the better moments. 
• Of course there was a pretty bad moment today too, when my layout editor who is prob going to EIC next year, came up to me in fifth hour to tell me that one of the girls who was on staff last year but quit after I got full leadership apparently thinks she came up with our theme. All I’m saying is if I hear anyone credit our theme to Ashley and not me, I’m gonna get in a fist fight. Yeah.
• My favorite things about our book are my closing copy (which I’ll post another time) and how when you hold it up and look at the side opposite the spine, you can see all the colors I used for the folio. It’s beautiful, really. (✿◠‿◠)