Some Notes on Notes

I'm going through a box of undergraduate notes right now. For some reason I felt the need to save notes from every class I took. All of my biology, chemistry, physics, psych, calculus, and bible notes are in there. When I threw out most of my med school notes a few weeks ago I didn't have as much nostalgia. I've been reading through my undergrad notes and see evidence of the budding relationship between me and my wife, inside jokes between friends, birthday wishes written down, quotes from my favorite teachers, and grades both excellent and horrifying. My wife and I sat together in several classes we had and I'm amazed at how much we wrote in each other's notebooks back and forth. I've found doodles of whatever I was occupied with at the time: hacky sack, politics, etc. My friends would write in my notebook when it was my birthday and leave me notes calling me "fatty" and "peter pan", nicknames I had from different people at the time. It makes me appreciate how much time and effort my professors put into teaching us and cultivating a relationship with us when I see quotes from their classes written down. There are classes I should have gotten A's in that I somehow managed to get B's in. There are classes like Dr. G's Plant Biology where I needed to ace the final to get an A in the class, and I studied like a fiend to get the highest grade in the class and get the A. Dr. G knew how to make a hard test. I'm amazed at how much I've remembered and how much I've forgotten. I look at my calculus notebooks and it looks like they are in a foreign language. I look at organic and can't remember the names of the reactions but somehow it looks familiar like I could figure it out again. Well, that's enough reminiscing, back to throwing away some of my old stuff, or maybe not.