A smaller version of my current self...

Denise and I knew this day was coming. She had more to fear than I did as she had a more recent connection to the space. The call came 2 weekends ago. We answered...

Mom wanted us to clean out our old bedroom!

Most of my belongings had already been removed. The treasures I came away with were mostly of the nonfiction variety. Yearbooks, photo albums, handwritten notes, and the like. As I browsed through my life I was struck by one item in particular... my kindergarten yearbook (yes, I had a yearbook in Kindergarten, apparently I had already embraced the idea of memory preservation at this point in my life). The book is noteworthy for one reason, its signatures.

Even in kinder I had some strong perfectionist tendencies. Let me explain...my tender 6-year old mind apparently decided that my playmates' signatures were written with poor penmanship. In order to correct this most horrific sin, I erased (because kindergarteners sign yearbooks in pencil...) their signatures and REWROTE them in neater handwriting. I know, I can't believe I did that either. But I didn't stop there. One students penned that he hoped I had a "rad" summer. I thought that "rad" actually meant "bad" so I performed a small lexical switch and replaced "rad" with "good". Sigh...perfectionism is in my blood. Even before I knew about the pros and cons of this character trait, I possessed it. I try to keep these tendencies under control, but when I look back at my 1988 RBG yearbook I am reminded of the great burden that I bear.

Exhibit A (notice all of the erasures)

Exhibit B (more erasures)

Exhibit C (the "rad" to "good" change...apparently the misspelling "realh" didn't bother me too much...or more accurately, I hadn't even learned to spell the word yet)