If I signed your yearbook, you might’ve seen me constantly check my apple watch while writing in it and probably thought something like: “what the fuck is this guy doing?”
And the answer to that question was that I was copying off an email I sent to myself containing the yearbook message I had already prewritten on a doc beforehand.
My first couple of yearbook signings weren’t like that though. Originally, I found myself taking 30 minutes to sign a single yearbook because I had to “write in the moment”. I find writing in the moment for people to be really hard, which might be due to the fact (as I’ve mentioned multiple times in past posts already) that I care a lot about what I mean to other people. Yearbooks are obviously one of the last few times you can leave an impression on someone so I always felt like I had to capture hours upon hours of memories into a single paragraph and then filter all of those memories to see which ones would make the final cut. Spending thirty minutes to write a yearbook message obviously isn’t the most convenient especially when people want to ask other people to sign their yearbook so I just decided that I would spend the 10-30 minutes thinking at home to write the messages. Adding onto that fact, I couldn’t find the yearbook messages that I wrote in the moment to be satisfying at all because one, my grammar was always messy; two, I would remember a cooler memory that I would’ve definitely included after finishing the message; and three, the whole structure was so lame whether it be a basic beginning to the message or what.
I think one of the hardest parts of signing a yearbook might’ve been coming up with a unique beginning sentence. I was only able to do it for a few people even with pre-writing everything on a document and those were probably the ones I found most satisfying. Sometimes when I finished someone’s message on my doc, I would feel really shit because I guess it showed me that this person didn’t really mean a lot to me even though I spent a lot of time with them. The even worse part was that I started thinking about yearbook messages around late April and I still could barely come up with anything decent for some people.
Naturally, the question that came to my mind was the following: Does the amount of things that come to my mind when I think of someone dictate how much they mean to me? I actually mentioned a slight bit of this when I was signing someone’s yearbook but I don’t think there is a clear answer. The ones I had an easier time writing for were the people who had the most “shock factor” in my life. The people who I never knew could mean a lot to me were more memorable for me. Whereas for the typical friends that I spent a lot of time with, I found it hard to write because their meaning as a person came from their presence and having someone to be there with me. I never had moments that stood out to me yet I would still consider them close to me as friends.
I’ve eventually come to the conclusion that yearbook messages don’t really define how much someone means to them but rather how much of their meaning can be translated into words on a page. I personally tried to keep my messages short because my end goal was trying to leave my impression of someone over leaving a list of moments in their yearbook.
If I really think about it, I get to walk home with two signed yearbooks: one being a physical copy and one on a google doc. The physical book itself represents how I was perceived as a person in high school while the google doc represents how I saw everyone in high school. Both represent something just as meaningful and whether or not you think I’m a bum for pre-writing yearbook messages, I’m perfectly happy walking away from high school with double the value.
If I signed your yearbook, I hope you guys enjoyed what I wrote. There were a few people I didn’t get to sign despite already having them on my doc but I’m highkey tired of signing more yearbooks. If I didn’t sign it, then I probably didn’t have a lot to say to you. I would’ve felt more satisfied not writing anything than writing something with no meaning/thought behind it. Either that or I used all my creative juice on my blog instead of a message that I couldn’t easily write.
Here’s a screenshot to show the doc is real btw. There’s more names than this, but yeah. The X’s show who I wrote one for but never got around to signing.
Next Post: What is an Award? (6/24/26)
Photo of The Day:
I didn’t really do much today to be honest. I mostly stayed home for the day and rested up. Here’s a photo of me and my brother playing Flee the Facility on Roblox though.
Performative Frank 
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