Loves farm animals.

I found pieces of ripped up paper in my Physics textbook from an unknown time that, when put back together, rendered this phrase.

Who is Tina? Why does she love farm animals? <del>HOW does she love them</del> what came before the &? Does someone else love them and the author merely had bad grammar, or is there an entirely different subject there?

Also in physics, the teacher has a book he works the problems in so we have something to check against to see if we've done the work right, and he's collected waste paper for *twenty years* to fill that book. I am not kidding. There is a page from January 01 1980 with a class roster, complete with social security numbers. There are many pages from the morning announcements in 1997, photocopied with their all caps word-processor font.

It's like delving into a lost world, except it was my school. Yet just ten years ago it was so different. Few of the teachers mentioned are still there, the high school back then still had the 7th and 8th grade (it just now dropped 9th grade), after prom consisted of paintball and a movie, rather than laser tag, an obstacle course, a mechanical bull, a rock wall, karaoke, texas hold 'em and other things.

It reeks of a time when the student body was probably 100 students less, despite having three grades more included, closer and more tight-knit, more school spirited and less filled with flagrant debauchery (of course there was still plenty of debauchery, that was when my sister was starting to get into drugs and the crowd they consist of, but I would hope that the freshmen didn't hump one another in the middle of the court yard. Heck, they didn't do that last year)

But my topic is broader than this. I have always been interested in the ways things have been. I love to dig through old records and imagine the world as it existed then, nostalgia for things I never experienced. I explain this as it relates to computing on the front page of my web site, but it's more than that too. I think it stems from a desire to know things, and to find out anything I can. When I was little, instead of doing things with my grandparents at their house, I would run upstairs and snoop around in the old bedrooms of my mom and uncles.

Do you guys do this? Do you have an archive.org addiction, looking back on how webpages used to be and thinking back to how the users acted then, or perhaps you're a yearbook junkie, looking past the bad fashions to the club and organization pictures for insight on how students then spent their time and effort doing. Maybe you spent hours in your attic looking through your brother and sister's old belongings, looking at notes and pictures with faces cut out, wondering who they were and why they were gone.

It's like modern-day archaeology, that's what it is.