If you read my article last week, you may remember that I have a hard time throwing anything out. And while I may have exaggerated the collections I’ve built up over the years, the extent of said exaggeration wasn’t all that much. I genuinely have a difficult time throwing things out or giving them away, and not for any materialistic means, but for the sheer memories that so many of my collections hold for me.

One thing that I’ve often been told is that I have a lot of shirts. And while that is true, I only keep so many of them because they hold memories I’m not sure I’m willing to lose yet. It only takes a glance at them to recall where I was when I got them, who was with me, and what the day was like. Maybe that’s why I’ve so easily gravitated to collecting mementos, preserving time through objects. Because though there may be a million selfies to swim through online, there will only ever be one personal treasure to touch.

But you can’t hold onto things forever, which is why I’m cleaning out my closet (the cheer you just heard was my grandmother). And while I doubt people are going to be searching high and low for shirts like mine, I figure that I could, before donating them, at least commemorate what they mean to me.

This week’s shirt is a little piece I like to call “The Ugly School Competition T-Shirt from Freshman Year”

The year was 2011. I was a squeaky-faced freshman at an International Baccalaureate high school that was making a name for itself as an institution of collegiate academics, Socratic seminars, and a tight-knit student body (and mental breakdowns, but that comes later). The building was industrial, painted in gorgeous, warm colors that burned when the overhead skylights poured sunlight into the school. There was a student café called Central Perk, which I thought was so clever (because I had never seen Friends before), and I would often buy huge muffins there. They were CostCo muffins, so make of that what you will, but the important thing was that I bought them. As a high school student. And that made me an adult.

There was no middle school shame that clouded my day-to-day interactions. And when I say that, let me be clear – I was still an awkward, unsure, gangly kid that worried about how much he spoke through his nose. But it was so refreshing, so rewarding, so important that as a freshman in high school I got the opportunity to walk down the hall without feeling like I was a loser for being me.

After all, when you go to a school that is only filled with nerds and geeks, who worried about matters of international economy and whose only sports were cricket, debate, and drag racing, there’s really nowhere else for your self-esteem to go but up.

It was the second semester of that year when someone, in an effort to raise money for one of the many, many clubs that my school had – when one dissolved inevitably two would grow back - began a competition. In a smack-down of biblical proportions, two big plastic jugs were set up in the library (we had a beautiful library, and so very impressive to have made plastic jugs look important). Students were to donate money into the jars, which corresponded with one of two teachers that were at the school – a Social Studies teacher known for his Southern drawl and a Foreign Language teacher known for how much of a nerd he was. Whichever teacher got the most money donated into their jar had to do a stunt in front of the student body.

Oh yeah, this made the Game of Thrones look weak.

OK, I give this event a lot of shit in my mind because after years of school spirit fundraisers, I’m pretty apathetic about the whole thing now. But back then, I was super excited. It was a group fundraiser where my decision of who to donate spare change to mattered! Never mind the fact that I didn’t particular care even then which teacher “won” since I didn’t know either of them particularly well - there were stakes on the line!

When you donated money, you were able to receive a T-shirt that corresponded to the team you were on, and the shirts were colored differently for each teacher. I don’t remember if the money for the shirts came out of the donations or if it was paid for separately. But keep in mind, this was before I became a money-grubbing college student who could smell a dime from a mile away, so I didn’t keep a great track on what I spent in the name of school spirit.

Regardless, a difficult choice lay ahead of me. Should I support the teacher I had never had, in the name of getting his scarlet shirt that I knew would look good on me? Or should I support the Foreign Language teacher who had taught me last semester the basics of Spanish that I still use cuando necesito, despite the fact that I would get a yellow shirt that would make me look like an unfortunately aged banana popsicle?

The democratic process at work, people.

As you can clearly see from the unfortunate photo above, I sided with the Foreign Language teacher. Even at the announcement assembly, where people were sorted by the color of their shirts into camps that cheered in a high school stupor for their teachers, there were lingering doubts about whether or not I should have voted as I did. After all, the money was all going to the same place, and that was the important thing, wasn’t it? Shouldn’t I have just gotten the shirt I wanted?

But as I was cheering along in the crowd, it struck me that, there, in that moment, I was a part of a group of people that was united by a silly popularity game that no one was taking seriously. And when it was over people would laugh at whatever stunt would happen, and then we would all go back to working our asses off writing analyses of postmodern critiques of Shakespeare and studying flash cards on the Krebs cycle and rehearsing speeches in Arabic. Because that’s the kind of school I went to – a school that cared about everything so damn much. We were competitive, intelligent peers who would boost each other higher as we navigated the curriculum and the perils of being a young adult, just because we cared about each other and the world at large. On our worse days, we were apathetic and sarcastic little shits who gripped a superiority complex so tight in order to compensate for the fact that we had no fucking idea what we were doing. It was one of the best experiences of my life, as strange as that sounds, because we all knew we were in this boat together. We could engage in this single popularity contest because we normally didn’t; it was a waste of our time and intellect when was more important work to do. And I will hold onto those four years in my heart always for this reason.

This t-shirt not only reminds me of a silly competition, it reminds me of how much my high school spirit means to me. There was hell to pay later on in high school, but the spirit of caring for each other and the strive to care for the world never changed. And even as I sit here in this ghastly golden yellow, I wrestle with the decisions of giving this treasure away. Will I be able to access the sensory stimulation without slipping this shirt on? Does a memory depend on an artifact to ground it? Have I cheapened my experience by giving away something that represents it?

Will I ever stop asking questions on the theory of knowledge?
(Never).

Tune in next week for an exploration of another one of my high school shirts – the one that represented a year of musical hell.

(And if you’re wondering what the result of the competition was, Language teacher lost. He walked around school all day in Jedi robes. My nerd school fucking ruled.)