 WITNESS TO THE PAST
Years have passed and you have graduated from university. You miss your friends, your
instructors, the conversations and even the assignments you were given in your university
years. Life is totally different now and is filled with different people. One night,
memories come flooding back to you. What is left from those years other than what is
stored in your mind? It could be a yearbook with a record of some of those memories in its
pages. People you wrote to; people that wrote to you. You look at the pictures. You see
your pages; your friends told you to keep in touch but after all these years none of them
are still in your life.
Then a flashback comes to your mind of the time you spent preparing your entries for the
yearbook…
I do not want to regret my contribution to the yearbook. It is a difficult task to write
about your friends, while you are studying for an exam or preparing a project in your last
year. You barely have time for the yearbook. But before the present becomes the past and
you are remembering those days, use your time to contribute something meaningful to the
yearbook. Do not rush and limit your time and creativity to write about your friends.
There are many things you may want to include while you are organizing your page. It is a
hard decision about whom to place at the beginning of the page. Be careful not to offend
anyone.
Another thing which is common, in order to show your popularity, is to ask many people to
write about you. It could be funny as all of these people may not be close to you. Of
course, it is a matter of opinion if you want quantity or quality to be what triggers your
memories years from now. I am opting to ask the people who know me best, who have shared
different experiences with me to help paint the picture that I will look back on.
What I hate to read is the same column over and over again only with names changed. I do
not want see sentences like "Ayşe/Ahmet is a nice person." I want to see the
memories and different characteristics that make us all different from each other. This is
not the place for: "We used to hang out in Ankuva, we used to run away from classes
and we used to study exams together." Come on, this is not high school. Nor it is it
the testimonial that you wrote on Yonja.com. It is a yearbook for university that you will
look upon and remember while you are smiling. We need to challenge ourselves. Not everyone
is a born poet or writer. But I know that all of us have different things that are worth
writing, expressing and sharing. We have put so much energy into writing assignments and
essays for the past four years. This might be the only assignment you remember, as best
friends are worth more effort and thought than any homework assignment.
What I also hate to see in the yearbook, are people who look like each other. Where all of
the photos have been edited in Photoshop deleting the characteristic lines and
idiosyncrasies of everyone. You begin to wonder who those people are with the perfect
faces? Did I know them? All of the girls have make up, and their hair is made up the same
way. The boys are shaved. Everyone looks pretty - not like the faces you see normally or
the face you see the morning of an exam. It is funny to see all of your friends captured
not as themselves as you saw everyday for four years but as caricatures of themselves.
The biggest challenge is to write about your best friend. If this person is the one who
you spent all of your time with, studying for exams together, doing projects with, going
out together, watching your favorite movie together, going to concerts, crying on each
other's shoulder and telling each other secrets, then writing about this person in just
one paragraph might be on of the hardest tasks in the world.
In my opinion to achieve the best result, do not leave writing about your friends and
memories to the last day. You will not be happy to see the hurried effort after the years
have passed. You cannot turn back time. Run away from all the cliques and mistakes, and
have an excellent year book.
Gülay Acar (COMD/IV)
howtoreachgulay@yahoo.com
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