Work in Progress - Menship & Friendship

I've spent many an hour the last few days going through old letters sent clandestinely during highschool class, scanning them, straightening them, and will soon be printing them... on fabric!
Why all the care for old highschool letters? Well, I'm a hoarder.  5 years ago I would have just been consider a "packrat" but apparently the language has changed and feels a lot more shameful.  But, it doesn't bother me.  I'm not dirty about it, I just hang on to things - I'm a very sentimental person, and always have a feeling something will be used, if not now then later on.  I've had these jars stuffed with folded old letters from highschool hanging around my childhood bedroom for 10+ years, and always look on them when I'm home.  Sometimes I'm terrified someone's going to go through them (ridiculous I know, cause no one would, and even if they did, why would it matter?  It's not exactly nuclear secrets squirreled away), sometimes afraid myself to go though them, and sometimes needing a little shot of the past.  But finally, my pack ratting has paid off and these old letters are getting used in my new body of work.
This is just a little sneak peek, but the jist of the work is about how as women, we glorify the idea of manship (maybe men glorified ladyship too, but I don't know I was never a highschool boy) but really it's our friendships that get us through and no where is this idea more prevalent than in highschool.  We killed so much time having crushes, have newer crushes, going back to old crushes, talking about boys, wondering about boys, dreaming about boys, but we did all this together, cementing (and sometimes breaking) our friendships over it.  Always wanting to be in love, and thinking love was an oasis in an otherwise hormonally crazy world, but the it was the boys who made us crazy and our friendships (lady friendships and boy friendships) that made us strong, and got us through those insane years.
Here are some sneak peek pictures from my digitizing, and yes these are all excerpts from old letters, wrote over 10 years ago, folded up, and passed conspiratorily from one to another in the halls, across the lunch table, or in class.
Not just a few of them ask whether or not I'm keeping the letters, threaten that I'd better, and ask what I do with them.  No way did I, or anyone else, think they'd wind up digitized and on display over a decade later.  Also, not a one of them forsaw what any of our lives had in store.  What a wonderful, mysterious thing this life is.

For more pics, check out the jump.
(apparently I can't make the jump work, so just look below)