A Love Letter to Lisa Frank and 5 Star Notebooks

As a child, the only exciting thing about school starting again was buying school supplies. This was a way to craft your identity for the year. 

Many times I would buy the blank cheap folders so I could draw anything I wanted. It usually depended on what I was into drawing that year.

• 2nd Grade: huge battleships
• 3rd Grade: skeletons, zombies, and skaters
• 4th Grade: tattoo styled drawings
• 5th Grade: horror themed drawings or 3rd grade revisited
• 6th Grade: Southpark

Most of my peers came to school in their awesome Dallas Cowboys Starter Jackets with Miami Dolphins and San Francisco 49's folders. I never cared much for football or being with the in crowd. I rocked my Lotto jacket just as hard as their Starter gear. 

The NHL was terrible with licensing at the time, so I couldn't sport a Blues folder easily. 

The girls were into Lisa Frank. I'll admit, there was a part of me that was jealous. The colors on those folders were insane.

Instead, I was a fan of the "No Rules" line of Trapper Keeper folders. You know, the ones that were deliciously 90's extreme. 

These are two I actually owned, as well as one with bears playing hockey.

I however was not a Trapper Keeper binder sort of guy. Instead, I liked the Five Star binders that had the zippers. There are three reasons I can think of for my preference:

1. The ad campaign during Saturday morning cartoons
2. Because they were functionally better (more pockets)
3. There was a game in my elementary school where you would try to knock an unsuspecting kid's books and pencil box out of his hands and all over the hallway. The zipper made cleanup much easier. 

When it came to colored pencils, it was Crayola or get the F*CK out! 

Anything other than Crayola had duller colors and tips that would break every 15 minutes. 

Notebooks had to have perforated edges and be college ruled. I swear, if you hand me a piece of notebook paper that has the nasty edges from being ripped from a binder, we're no longer friends. 

And lastly, the lunchbox. Early on, I usually was rocking Ghostbusters or Ninja Turtles. Then I switched to the brown bag, but because of the game I mentioned earlier, it often ended up on the floor, bruising my banana. 

My solution was to eat a simple combination of a sandwich, fruit snack, and CapriSun. Sure the sandwich might be a soggy mess by lunch, but I could deal with that. By the end of school, I'm starving and would make up the lack of calories at dinner where I would stuff two plate fulls into my mouth.