Over the years, I have tried my best to completely avoid any situation in which I’d have to pull out my old yearbooks. Let’s be honest. Does any man really want to be reminded of his less than awesome pubescent years? Last I checked, it’s pretty much a time we’d all like to forget.
Well, I have to face my demons someday. Might as well be today. I present to you:
Walk With Me Down Puberty Lane: Yearbook Celebration #1
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1993. Welcome to seventh grade. I think it’s pretty easy to see why when I envision hell, I envision being stuck in a place just like this. I’m sure you’d like to see what I looked like in seventh grade. Hey, I’dlike to see what I looked like in seventh grade. Obviously I didn’t think too highly of myself back then because I made sure that no future generation would ever be able to make out little Tony Pearce (come on, they couldn’t even get my name right?) or his fat little face.Honorable mentions go to Jamie Peacock for helping take some of the attention off of me by living up to her last name. Lisa Pectol also helped me out by side-whistling during her photo. In my seventh grade yearbook, I put a star next to all of my best friends pictures. I’m guessing from this image you can guess which table I sat at come lunchtime.
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1994.Welcome to eighth grade. As you can see, my self esteem is improving somewhat due to my photo not being scribbled out and the circling of my own name to emphasize how cool I was. And how could my self esteem not improve with beautiful swoopy bangs like that!? The striped collars were really in fashion (check out Mark Passey, he’ll back me up), and this year the yearbook committee was kind enough to get my name right.Honorable mentions go to Jamie Peacock again, who made sure to keep those bangs bigger and even more beautiful just for my sake. Guys still parted their hair that year, and that part really stuck when putting more than two pounds of gel in one’s hair every morning. I bet the hair gel companies really miss 1994.
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1995.Welcome to ninth grade. Oh, yeah. We were the big dogs on the Junior High campus as evidenced by the color photos in the yearbook this year. Besides my rapidly increasing popularity, which can be demonstrated by the number of friends highlighted in pink (congrats to Nick Peay who had no star in seventh grade but is solidly highlighted now), this year brought much goodness. The bowl cut with the center-line part put me at the top of the fashion click and my half-cocked grin really invited the female fans to go gaga. Hair gel was still extremely popular in large amounts as well as collared shirts in general.Honorable mentions go to Justin Pehrson who was always successful at never having a single hair fall out of place. Sam Pehrson who was a pioneer in the plaid long sleeve lumberjack fashion, and Greg Pierce was still one of my number one friends at the awesome table.
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1996. Welcome to tenth grade. High school. The greatest place on earth if you love wanting to die. As you can see, the hair part was finally starting to go out of style. At this point it was short, fuzzy, ugly that brought the girls to the table, and apparently I was the only one who got the memo. This year I decided to sport the ultra-high-fashion green and white striped button-down, which I found wadded up in the corner of a barn. For some reason they put sophomores and juniors together this year, and so, how embarrassing awesome, I got to be right next to my older sister in the yearbook.
Honorable mention goes to Jeffrey Pead who amazingly does not look awkward or weird. Eliza Payne kept the ever so popular round rimmed glasses looking good, and Tomi Pearce, my amazing sister, had the crimp job and bangs of the century. Oh, and Tomi, top button wasn’t in until the next year. Nice try though.
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1997.Eleventh Grade. I look amazingly not fat in this photo, and if I didn’t know better I may have started losing my super-nerd status. I think this was during the era of Phen-Fen and boy did it work awesome on overly fat adolescents. Who cares if my heart valves are all rotten from the inside out. As seen above, I loved to sport my shark tooth necklace and while less fuzzy, the ugly fuzz look of 1996 carried through another year.Honorable mentions go to Erik Pearson who had some sort of awesome front tuft going on with his hair. Nick Peay took plaid a little too far with his crew neck style choices, but made up for it with his futuristic insight that the top button should never remained buttoned. Me, I was riding that fad to the next station in a hurry.
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1998. Senior Year. A time when I really did know everything and nobody could tell me differently. Well, I knew everything except that the priest-collared shirt fad would only last about five days. Everybody wore them during those five days, but I was the only lucky one who got senior portraits taken late and therefore immortalized the fashion. Back at the top of the schoolyard pack, we got color photos again, which was awesome because it really accentuated my beautiful acne. Gel was back in full force, but we just used it to plaster our hair flat against our heads, no actual styling necessary.
Honorable mentions go to Jonathan Passey, who had a perfectly gelled bowl cut perm, even three years after everybody else stopped wearing them. Dan Patterson was able to crush tin cans with his neck. And Katie Partidge looked like a freakin’ 30 year old movie star. Eliza Wren Payne turned out to be the only one from my entire high school to ever be famous.
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2010. Twice divorced. Single. Broke. Hair gel has come back in style with a vengeance. The cockatoo hairdo (as my dad would call it) is ever present, and dressing up for a good time involves ties with polo shirts and flood pants. I still struggle with many of the “adolescent” horriblenesses. Acne. B.O. General female anxiety. Fashion crises. Weight gain. No friends at lunch. And the list could easily go on and on and on and on… just like junior high and high school did. I don’t even have Greg Pierce to hang with anymore.
Honorable mention goes to me for my non-trimmed eyebrows and mis-tied necktie. My attempt at a GQ pose caused passer-bys to snicker at my noviceness, which still hurts. And the only style I’ve ever truly perfected has been the straight up nerd style as can be evidenced by, well, everything you see here.
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Haha, what are your worst memories of those years of your life?
Or, do you have the guts to post and roast at least one year in your yearbook. If you do, scan or take a good picture of the absolute worst year of your yearbooks. Insert it into a comment below (using IMG tags). If you don’t know how to do that, email it to me (my address is at the top of the page) and I’ll post it for you. Then, roast yourself and your classmates! It’ll be incredibly fun and incredibly therapeutic for you.
Or, do you have the guts to post and roast at least one year in your yearbook. If you do, scan or take a good picture of the absolute worst year of your yearbooks. Insert it into a comment below (using IMG tags). If you don’t know how to do that, email it to me (my address is at the top of the page) and I’ll post it for you. Then, roast yourself and your classmates! It’ll be incredibly fun and incredibly therapeutic for you.
If we can get at least seven people to do it, I’ll send $10 iTunes gift cards to the most popular five. Post it anytime, but deadline to enter for the iTunes is five days from this original post.
Please also immediately post this page on Facebook and Twitter, before you do anything else. I don’t care if your baby is in the tub burning or your cake is in the oven flattening. We need participation!
Dan Pearce, Single Dad Laughing
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VioletalaMode
You know, most people who looked good in HS don't do so now. Okay, most do lol. But in some cases, like with me I feel that I got better with age. I prefer it this way :)
I'm not sure why you would think you were ugly. You were a cutie! Mind you, that may be saying more about the boys I went to school with than you...:-)
If only I had a scanner.. totally going year book diving so i can roast and toast people in my head and not feel bad haha
I have a nerdier pic then you. . .I'll see if I can find it. I doubt it. I tried to burn all of them. I might have missed one or two.
Ugh! We are the same age and somehow my yearbooks are all missing!!! I remember the hair clothes and etc... PS whatever happened to the Peacock grrl???? HA Her hair was awesome! :)
i so would but my yearbooks are put up in storage....
So glad I'm a year older. Don't need any of my old yearbook photos out there >shudder
I think you do.
so doing this dan... gotta get logan to did out my year book... 10th grade year was a "good" year for me (i looked like a greasy haired elf...) ... i wanna find my 8th grade year when i forgot i was girl... yup or wait... even elementary 1st day 3rd grade, a boy in my class asked if i was a girl or a boy... RUDE... however, the bastard gave me great insite that day maybe the bowl cut with the center part that all the boys sported was not a good look... oh no i jazzed it up the next year with a bob cut, samba's, "no fear" soccer shirts and jeans... and i always wondered why i NEVER got the giant hershey kiss valentines from the boys at school.... haha, i'll get them tomorrow~
OMG Erica, LOL you've gotta do it! Haha.
I used to do the same highlighting thing and star thing. haha. I met you, your senior year, have that yearbook. wonder where it is and who i have highlighted in there....hmmmm.
I'm pretty sure everybody used to do that Aimee! It's the only way we could feel popular.
Holy Glamour Shot, Katie. I bet that was the hottest picture that was ever taken of her. Which is a little sad.
This rocked so hard that my face almost melted off. I couldn't even begin to tell you where any of my yearbooks are, I've moved so many times. BUT I've already roasted my high school senior picture on my blog. Circa 1996. If you would like to view the horror and add it to your contest, it is here:
http://www.saltsays.com/?p=3532
Okay Salt. Problem number one. Besides the awesome roots and piercings, you were pretty hot. (I'm allowed to think that since you're totally legal now, right?) Problem #2, my contest was pretty much a flop cause nobody would post anything. Haha. I had a couple dozen people tell me, "I will if anybody else goes first". I even had one pinky promise from somebody who said they'd get the ball rolling and post and it didn't happen.
What happened to the sanctity of the pinky promise?
Katie Partridge thought she was a movie star. I can just tell these things.
Great collection of memories!
Haha, Laura didn't every girl back then with those awesome Glamour Shots?!
lol Dan this is awesome!! I would totally post some of mine if I could ever find them! We have moved a ton! I could always borrow yours, but I am afraid to hear what you would say about me :)
No way Amber, this isn't me bashing you, this is YOU bashing you! Haha, you want me to post yours so that you can do it? It would be NO problem! :)
good point! not sure if I want you to pick what get posted. :) I will check my boxes soon and see what I can come up with!
I just stumbled across your blog, which is kind of awesome and just wanted to say hi!
This is such a great post. I might have to participate. If I can find any of my old yearbooks. It's possible I burned them.
Oh, and fun fact. I went to church with Eliza Wren Payne back when I first moved to Utah. It was six months before I ever knew she could sing.
Karen, what a small world! Haha, Eliza was a great friend back in the day.
PLEASE post your pics. I've had so many people message me today and say that they would if anybody else would, and nobody wants to take that first step. It'd be SO awesome!
Dan,
Are you calling me a dork? I do believe we hung out together. I would so post my pics but I don't have a death wish. My year books are up in the attic being properly stored in 150 degree heat. My senior picture is by far my worst. I was told they weren't going to put that one in.
Death wish?! Haha, I've been scared of those yearbook photos for 12 years now. It's very liberating to just get them out in the open and make fun of myself! Haha.
Hey there! I found you via Spanky (heh). I thought I recognized some of your classmates at first, but it turns out that we were all pretty much dorky across the nation. I will say that by 1998 I had managed to figure out how to straighten my hair, but my eyebrows sadly remained untamed.
You're a brave, brave man. I'm pretty sure I'd have mad flashbacks that include discovering someone wrote "Gini Insert Last Name Here Is A Bitch" on the stall in the library bathroom." The good news is that most kids don't read, so I doubt anyone really saw it unless they were in there to sneak a line of coke or give a **** ***. You know, the things normal teenagers do in rural Texas...
Well, Spanky rocks for sending you along! Haha, you make me laugh. Texas was way harder core than anything here in Happy Valley Utah! One kid wrote, I'm writing on your crack, does it tickle? in my yearbook.
I would have loved to send my photos in, but we were poor and I never got a yearbook. My pics were actually not bad because I didn't turn into a dork until after I graduated. I was too afraid to act like a dork in school until years later when I saw everyone else was doing it, so I joined in. In a few years, my kids are gonna love me!
So let me get this straight... you were the popular good looking one in high school? Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for visiting my post and rubbing off a little bit of your awesomeness.
Oh wait, just read that you're a dork now. Oh well. Welcome to the club.
Would you mind if I took that little bit of awesomeness back? It's all I had left. Thanks. Is it really sad that I got so excited about being welcomed to "Club Dork"?
Love this post!!!!!!
THANKS for visiting Natalee! You're awesome!
Now see - only at a time like this, where I could legitimately prove to the WWW that I am a friggen dork, I can't. Because I don't own a scanner. However, this is lucky for you, because if you were to see my 7th-12th grade pics you would undoubtedly have to endure years of therapy afterward. So, in a sense, I just saved you from horrible images being burned into your clever brain!
Sande, I think you HAVE to post something. Take a photo of it. It'd be AWESOME.
Oh My God. Highlighting names brings me back. I had some kind of rating system for how cool people were...which was pretty hilarious coming from me. I also starred people who were friends. And to achieve friend status, I had to recognize your name. I need to burn my yearbooks.
Wow, recognizing names is what it took for you? I didn't even do that. Just wait until my second yearbook post when I post the comment I wrote to myself out of a Spanish dictionary pretending I was a girl in love with me.
Umm, this is amazing. I'm not anywhere near my yearbooks, or I might be tempted to post some pictures, but it was only like 6 years ago I had my senior pictures taken, so they aren't quite as awesome to make fun of.
Sam, I just looked at your blog, and you're right. You're way too good looking to have ever been made-fun-ovable.
And I don't even know if you're the wife or the husband. Both dead sexy.
It's a good thing that I don't have any of my yearbooks, other than my senior one, because I looked like hell. If there were a category back then of "most likely to pull a Columbine" my face would have been there. Seriously, I don't have a lot of fond memories of high school and still am puzzled as to how I made it in one piece.
Haha, I love the Columbine comment. You kind of scare me. Good thing you can't go shootin' off in here for real.
I think tons of people feel like they were nowhere good enough or cool enough in high school. Even the ones that I thought were hot or popular (like me, ummm.. .sure...)
Relax, I'm not that messed up. Things improved quite a bit after high school when I realized that what went on there didn't have to define you the rest of your life. But I do cringe somewhat when thinking of these school shooters, knowing somewhat the desperation and helplessness they felt and just wanting to make a statement that they matter. Unfortunately they chose to embrace evil to make themselves heard, and they can never take back the harm they created. They never understood that high school eventually ends and real life begins, and nobody really cares about what did or didn't go on in high school anymore.
Haha, I'm sure the Columbine shooters told people they weren't messed up too. ;o)
You nailed it on the head. In high school the perception of what the real world is and who people really are is so taken in behind blinders!
Any idea why there's a bunch of question marks? That's weird.
You're a braver man than me!
Oh, come on Phil! I bet you have the guts. And I bet you want to. Just do it!
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This is funny! 11 months ago i lost my girl friend to cancer. While she was doing radiation treatment I posted photos of the two of us in grade 10 on our facebook walls. She laugh and I laugh so hard about it. We were so cool,LOL She loved acid wash jean so much she would wear it head to toe. I can't even tell you what i was thinking. Over sized Batman t-shirts and my hair cut in a short man bob. it was great to make her laugh. I miss her every day! If you can't laugh at yourself who can you laugh at!
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