Attached to the hands of every student for the past week, they hold the “memories” of the past school year. 

Sharpie-clad freshmen, attempting to have every single one of their friends pour their hearts out in the eleven pages of blank space, roam and stalk through the hallways.  And what is it all for?  So that they can make sure that at least 95 people tell them that they are “so awesome” and to “call me so we can hang over the summer”?

Let’s be honest, your best friends can’t possibly write what they feel in one single page, and the 90-odd others that ink through the pages really don’t know you well enough to say anything worth more than a glance.  Yearbook signing is left for the shallow hope of finding that a large group of people finds your presence absolutely essential to their existence. 

In 50 years, when you’re looking back on your high school yearbook because you’re going through a nostalgia-stricken depression, it’s highly unlikely that the set of abbreviations that you and your friends came up with are going to be remembered.  Sure, they’re great reflections of what has happened in the last few months, but those memories in today’s world are also posted on your Facebook wall. 

The need to have other people affirm that you had fun brings into question whether or not it was really as fun as you thought it was.  We sit around and recount the things we’ve done instead of making new memories.  If you know that you took at least 50 pictures and posted them to your blog, there’s no need to sit around and talk about it.  You can relive the moment and by going through the entire photo album.

You can’t deny the fact that face-to-face communication has declined in the past few years as we’ve become more and more reliant on our cell phone and Internet connection.  The fact that we are no longer going out of our way and being a friend detaches us even more from each other.

Each of us falls into an abyss as one of the hundreds of “friends” a person has on the Internet.  You can follow, reblog, tweet, comment, and like as much as you want, but your friendship is not on any higher level than the kid that your best friend met on vacation three years ago.

Can the fact that we can confine the best of our memories to a single glossy page in the back of a book speak for itself?  We are all friends on paper, but in real life, it’s hard to tell.