I love looking through my camera roll. I can spend hours scrolling through archives of photos and videos without getting bored. Especially this past year, the time I have spent scanning my camera roll, reminiscing about my favorite high school memories, has increased substantially. 

While I appreciate my camera roll’s never-ending supply of random selfies of my friends and me at football games and school dances, or videos of my teammates running during cross country meets, it has a large gap — my camera roll fails to capture something I like to call the “little moments.” You know, those small moments scattered throughout your day, like when your whole class randomly bursts into laughter or your friend’s coffee explodes everywhere. You never know when these moments are about to happen, and that’s half of the fun in them.

These past four years have been full of too many of these “little moments” to count, but here are some of my favorites.

Freshman year: It was the first block of the day, and my English class was watching the movie version of the novel “Never Let Me Go.” There were a few inappropriate scenes in the movie, so before they would come on the screen, my teacher would skip over them. Needless to say, she was not prepared when one of these scenes flashed across the screen. It didn’t take long for her to realize what was playing as laughter quickly filled the room. She jumped up out of her chair, planted her body in front of the screen and spread out her arms. The laughter shared by my teacher and class as she frantically tried to fast forward through the scene while simultaneously blocking the screen with her arms is something I’m always going to remember. 

Sophomore year: My Torch class was split into groups and prompted with the task of creating a song about some of the journalistic rules we had been learning. My group and I decided to write ours to the tune of “The Duck Song,” an extremely annoying, yet also oddly addicting, song that details the interactions between a duck and a man at a lemonade stand. I hit play on the YouTube video and all that came out of my Chromebook’s speakers was a lagging loop of a singular line from the song. And it wouldn’t stop. 

So there my fellow group members and I stood, bursting with laughter while staring at a frozen computer that was repeatedly playing a line from a song about a duck at a lemonade stand. And it wasn’t just any type of laughter — it was the kind where you are basically gasping for air (the best type of laughter, of course). We decided the best course of action would be to walk through the hallway with my computer to the Technology Help Desk. If you can imagine a group of students walking through the halls, hysterically laughing while holding a computer blasting “The Duck Song,” then you’ll have a pretty good idea of what the scene looked like.

Junior year: It was a Saturday morning, and my friend and I sat crammed next to each other in the back of a school bus on our way to a cross country meet. It wasn’t too long after we got on the bus that we decided it would be the perfect time to participate in some impromptu karaoke. A few short moments later, my friend and I were shouting Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now,” while trying to read the lyrics off her small phone screen. Yes, it was 7:30 in the morning and we were screaming Queen lyrics (rather badly, I might add) in the back of a school bus. Yes, everyone was staring at us. Yes, it was loads of fun.

Senior year: I look forward to the day I can decide what my favorite “little moments” of the year are. Until then, I’ll enjoy them as they happen.