Reunion
Hello everybody! Time for another one of my patented "what the h-e-double hockey sticks is he going to ramble on about THIS month?" entries!
The topic this time is one that we all will have to face at some point in our lives - the dreaded High School Class Reunion! Some of us (yes, I mean me) are so old that our 40th Anniversary of Graduating the experience they call High School is coming up this year. Most of the people I have met through M3wDB are way too young to be this advanced in the Reunion Lineage. You may be coming up on your first reunion experience, or your 5th , 10th or 15th or whatever number it may be and wondering..."should I stay or should I go?"
For me, the experience known as high school was not the enjoyable one many profess to have had. For those who say it was some of the best times of their lives, I say, "HAH!" Obviously, they were either editing all the painful awkwardness of teenage trauma from their memory, or they were one of those rare birds; the "popular" kids that the rest of the class envied to some degree. I was one of those misfits that just did not fit into any one clique, group, or gang. While I was able to make some friends on the wrestling team, I was not a jock. I was too smart for some, but not smart enough to impress the Honor Society. Naïve and awkward around the opposite sex, with little or no street smarts and a yearning to fit in, though I never did.
So, after graduation, what did most of us do? We stayed attached as much as possible to those we had befriended in high school and consciously edited out the ones that were no longer being inflicting on us. Many people I went to high school with are good people, but - in the years I spent with them at good old Chillicothe High - were also frustrating as all get out, and honestly, I have no desire to reconnect with most of the people I attended CHS with. And the ones I was on good terms with were still there and still friends, so for me, the High School Class Reunion experience was a lead balloon that I had no interest in trying to inflate. Yes, there is curiosity in how they turned out: was so-and-so successful, who has passed on, who got married, things like that. But actually, linking back up with some of these people gives me the willies.
But who knows, maybe you had a better experience in high school, more Dawson's Creek than Buffy. Maybe you actually liked all of your classmates and want to see them again. Good for you! For me, I think that I will attend this year's (only my second high school reunion in those forty years)...but unlike some, I will not seek out everybody and remember all the "good times". For me, it will be enough to meet those precious few that were actual friends with whom I may have lost touch, and not just renewing relations with acquaintances that I will never see again...except at these reunions!
That is enough bellyaching about coerced get-togethers from me for now. Hope, if you are going to your HSR, that it will be enjoyable and blood free!
See you in the funny papers!!