too cool for the scrapbooking school

these days scrapbooking is kind of a dirty word, at least if you're me and i am me so there. i like the idea of a scrapbook as an old dusty book full of pictures and interesting newspaper clippings and love letters that your grandpa wrote to your grandma during world war II. maybe some ticket stubs, a few pressed flowers, or a scrap of fabric from god-knows-where all against a brown-paper backdrop. i don't want to have anything to do with the pastel, cutesy, commericalized, craft store bullshit that has made scrapbooking a huge fad. i don't want to have to buy special printed papers and spent hours pouring over layouts with lace and stamps and ribbon. what a waste. i'd much prefer to have an archive of items that speak for themselves, that are interesting without all the frills.

i found a ton of old birthday cards and letters in a few of the boxes that were brought over from the parents' house. among them was this postard sent to me by a friend in high school. she was a german exchange student during my freshman year. we bonded over star trek. it was an all-girls high school so i had to find the star trek geeks where the getting was good. anyway, she left after a year and we kept in touch for a little while. her parents would often send my family christmas cards and little presents. she sent me this postcard sometime during my sophomore year, i am guessing by the postage date. on a field trip with her class to florence, italy, i suppose. europeans have the best field trips and vacations. the names have been blurred to protect the guilty. i don't even want to remember what some of my old nicknames were - they only speak to depth of my geekhood back then. i am still a geek, but i'd like to think a somewhat more sophisticated one. at least old enough to know when to quit. as for the friend who sent me the card, a little googling leads me to believe that she is currently (or was recently) studying for her PhD with the biology/immunology department at the university of konstanz. i guess i shouldn't be surprised that she was so easy to find - she was always smarter than me, therefore doomed to be more geeky and more successful. i'm kind of jealous.

i am a huge fan of the italian postage stamps. with colors like that, who needs embellishment? this is perhaps not the most fascinating letter on the planet, but give it a little time. postcards have a way of aging well. i'd like to think that a few decades from now someone will find this postcard and wonder about it. some day i will have to post some of the postcards that my great-grandfather sent to his french girlfriend during world war I. i also have scans of letters from my dad's side of family during world war II. they are really fantastic.