Who has a red headband and disagrees with the photographer's vision for this photo shoot?!

This girl.

Or, I should say This Girl and the Other Amanda (who we called "Mandy"), who is standing on my left. We're not happy. I'm not sure why Mandy was frowning, although I remember feeling pleased that I didn't appear to be the only girl taking a stand.

Although, this was part of the problem:


Cupcake Skirt, front and center!

Next to me is my pal Daniel. He was a fun kid. He has an extremely common surname, so I've never been able to find him on the Internet - I've searched for all my classmates from elementary school in the last few years. Elementary schools usually don't hold class reunions. Next to Daniel, we've got James, who would in 2nd grade take the fall for an incident involving the MacGruff the Crime Dog doll that we weren't supposed to touch, no matter what. (He was innocent, I was not.) On the other end, one girl over from me, is Tricia. Her dress had frogs on it. I still think that's the cutest dress of the bunch.

Anyway, the next year:


Front and center, where I belong! Duh.

My elementary-era BF Becky is on my left in this photo. She was in school with me from Kindergarten to 5th grade, but now I notice she is missing from the 2nd grade photo. We both moved in the middle of 5th grade, me to South Dakota, and she to West Memphis, AR. We were pen-pals for seven years, up until my First year of college. In my second-to-last letter to her, I told her all about my dorm and my classes and my school and everything. She wrote back telling me that she'd gotten married and adopted a puppy. My last letter to her was returned to me, stamped "address not known."

Then 2nd grade rolled around:


"Look dude. I'm willing to overlook being relegated to second row, off to the side, just this once. JUST THIS ONCE, ya hear?!"

Miss Echols. Not a fan of her. Either she was genuinely clueless about how coldly she treated me, or she was a mean lady. One of those. Not a lady in whom one can easily confess their MacGruff the Crime Dog-related malfeasance.

So, back to 3rd Grade:



I remember being surprised and taken aback even when we were being arranged for the photo. That face was not in-between expressions. And I joke, but it wasn't really about being front and center. It was about gender parity as symbolically represented by class photo placement! "The girls all have to be in the back?!"

He'd arranged us by clothing-type - I think he announced that. Whatever the reason, I was not amused.
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These recollections are brought to you by the Great Online Photo Organization Project of 2013. I've been down a rabbit-hole of memories spanning...oh, my entire life, for the last week. It's grueling work. Not just because of the hours upon hours of strangely satisfying and engrossing tedium (I flourish in the realm of detailed, tedious work), but because of the memories associated with each of the 18,815 images. Happy memories and sad memories. I smile, I cry. I feel like I've been spending time with the people in the photos recently, even though we haven't talked for days or weeks or months or years. It's been strange.

Project Steps:

1. Replace hundreds of low-res photos in my Flickr acct with their high-res counterparts from my computer. (Don't want to go into why I felt the need to not check the res when I was uploading to begin with.)
2. Organize them chronologically. Label them.
3. Get all the current photos off of my computer. Store them in a location that I can still access in the future, in the face of changing technology.
4. Make offerings to the Technology Gods that Flickr Shall Maketh Its Home on the Internets for All Of Eternity. OR that upon its eventual demise, the company will offer a strategy for saving and transferring one's account elsewhere.