Cole+B.

So, here we are: faced with a project in which we must succinctly describe our high school careers in a menagerie of facebook-friendly moments. I guess I've never been much one for pictures. Pictures are for people who can't remember things. And besides, who said sight was the best sense, anyway? If we look back merely through the lens of a camera, stuff gets left out. Important stuff. Stuff worth mentioning.

Stuff like the feeling of grass on my butt as I ate lunch on Cary Academy's quad for the last time at the end of my freshman year, surrounded by people I haven't seen much since then.

Stuff like impressions. Like strolling in the doors of Green Hope and thinking, //Sound. That is a lot of sound.// Like that nervous, hot-face feeling when faced with the at-first-overwhelming complexity of the floor plan, already ten minutes late to class on my first day. Can a picture capture dread? The growing horror that with the conclusion of freshman year, the clique train had left the station, that I was doomed to the life of some misfit social nomad? Certainly, the camera is no stranger to the poor decisions that follow such fear, and neither was I.

I want to take to a picture of hyperbole about academic workload, and the accompanying stress that precipitated summer before junior year. What sort of lens do I use? How can I capture confusion in a frame of just one person? Pictures leave stuff out. Big stuff. There aren't any pictures in this craftily pre-edited slideshow of the smell of an unlocked bus' seat as you try to fall asleep on it at 2 am. Or of junior burnout. Or of the haste to wolf down a sandwich between AP exams, sheer disbelief the only available emotion among us greenstick new kids on the block in the testing rooms. Who knows. Maybe if you could take a picture of junior year, just one picture to sum it all up, it would be one of those group shots where everyone has been smiling for ten minutes for a billion different cameras, and someone says, //ok, you guys are done//, but in the instant where everyone starts to relax, one more straggler shouts, //WAIT!// and one more flashbulb explodes and no one is smiling. Everyone just looks tired.

Senior year. My pictures from senior year were .pdfs. College applications, trying to overlay sensibility and creativity, and still seem like the sexy student of the next generation who's multifaceted and whatever else they care about these days. There were some .jpgs too, though. Pictures like the one you found flipping through new prints, back when there was film, and you'd say, //how did that get in there?// People I didn't know, and unfamiliar places, and the smell of general social dislike. I can't complain though, it had it's ups. Maybe the sound of banjo can play over my senior memories. I fell in love, and to avoid biting cliche, that's really something. The year was really something, actually. It was the smell of grandma's cooking juxtaposed haphazardly with that near-orgasmic sensation of jumping out of bed, thinking you way overslept, and realizing its Saturday. And then that was it. Done.

Probably nothing I've said in this slideshow lines up with any of the pictures I tossed in. Try not to think of it as accompanying narration. Think of it like your friend talking to you in a low voice, and you're really listening to them, when you should be listening to the teacher or principal or whoever. Anyway. I never really liked pictures, so much so that I didn't feel like going to old Prestige Portraits (tm) and tossing on a tuxedo bib and looking pretty as I could. I don't even think I'm in the yearbook. None of that really matters; what matters is that my high school memories won't ever be caught on the old Polaroid. They're safe in my head, and when it comes down to it, I like it better that way.