making history

August 23, 2010, about 3pm. It was the first day of school, this school year. And it was the end of the day, in my last class period. My day had been filled with mixed feelings of meeting and sizing up new teachers, filling my brand-new binders with notes and syllabi, and trying to find my way around and work out a new route for the year. And besides that, it was about 100 degrees outside. Just think Georgia in the summer. It's not a wonderful time to live in Georgia. The spring is lovely, but the summer is death. It was AP US History, known by the common acronym APUSH, and although I wanted to listen, the drama from the day and the heat had drained me. But suddenly my teacher ran outside of the room and didn't come back. We all looked at each other with strange looks. Why'd he just run out of the room? Where'd he go? Finally, after a couple minutes. He came back and we were too scared to ask what happened. Then he said "take out a sheet of paper and right down everything that just happened."
Nothing was to be heard but backpack zippers and pencil lead scraping across newly printed loose leaf paper. Then he asked a couple kids to read theirs aloud. They all generally sounded the same, but some used more flamboyant words than others.
he told us the reason why we did this was because we were making history and we had just recorded it. I doubt that anyone is going to actually dig for this evidence hundreds of years from now, but the point is the same. Every moment we are here we are making history.
Every moment we're here is important because it gives us one more time to do something, change something, or make something happen. That was all really redundant, I know.
But it's true. Every moment is history. In really intense stories from history, like Lincoln's assassination, every detail was important. And if someone was not there to record it, we would never know.
I'm going to make it a point to be the preserver of history. I always want to have a memory of every moment. I'm not going to be one of those freaks who videos my kid's every step (for the record I am never planning to, nor will ever have kids. Ever. Just wanted to clarify.), but just someone who makes notes of everyday life, because to me that's the most interesting stuff of all.
But first, I need to make some memories. That's what living life to the fullest is.