10-Year Reunion

[mishalak]

Well the one person I would want to see is going to the 10-year reunion of my high school class. However I would rather just see him on his own despite his encouragement that I should at least be morbidly curious to see how everyone turned out. High school may have been the worst four years of my life and I don't want to relive that time especially since I bear no love for either my classmates or the evil church that runs the institution I attended.

I would, likely, have to wear a suit. Normally not a situation that inspires me with dread or even annoys me. I love dressing up in almost any costume especially if I can be among the best dressed. However I hate being the one who is underdressed and looked down upon which I surely would be since the two Coors scions are just the most notable of the area's rich and famous sons who attended Regis Jesuit High School. They'll all be in their $2,000 outfits and me attempting to not look like an unkempt nerd in one from Men's Warehouse.

I'm also likely to be bored out of my skull. Next to none of my classmates read for pleasure when I knew them and that's not likely to have changed in the intervening decade. And that still is my touchstone for if a person is likely to be interesting or not. If a man never reads I've no interest in knowing him.

Plus there is the whole fear of giant crowds of people thing. That's not a rational reason, but it is real to me.

Oh did I mention that I'm likely one of two people who did not graduate from college?

What a marvelous opportunity to be socially embarrassed for $25. Fuck it.

Comments

[armoire-man.livejournal.com]

Ten-year reunions are problematic for people like you and me who hadn't "done anything yet" by that time. So, skip it. Call the guy up and go out for a beer. Tea. Wine. Whatever.

You might want to make the 20th, because everyone mellows out quite a bit by then and they don't have quite as much to prove.

I've never managed to find one of my reunions, and I'm not sure my class actually had one. Lately the high school has been throwing big "alumni parties" that span about fifty years, but the chance of meeting anyone I want to talk to is so low I just gave up the idea.

I would like to meet up with some of those people, find out what happened to them. I actually had a good time in high school because I fit in with a very large group of weirdos and therefore had the perfect high school experience of feeling accepted and outcast simultaneously.

I went to Carol's 10th reunion, or maybe 20th, and it was a real eye-opener. All the other people were just as old as we were! And just as fat and slow! Intellectually I knew this, but my subconscious still populated my high school class with eternal teenagers. The visual proof of their age was liberating.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

It isn't just that I have not done anything with my life. It is that since high school I've:

Dropped out of college three times
Never earned more than $21,000 a year
Been unemployed or not in school for 3 years cumulatively
Was fired
Was laid off
Killed two student organizations I headed through incompetence
Failed to finish writing five novels
Living in my parents' basement, just like when I left HS

I haven't just failed to do anything; I've actually, in my own small way, made the world a worse place than when I found it. Measured on a line graph I would have accomplishments in the negative numbers.

[armoire-man.livejournal.com]

And you're depressed and ashamed, and angry, probably...? And isolated.

The world is better for having you in it, definitely, so please don't leave it anytime soon. However, you *are* in one of the most depressing places known to man - the almost-thirty-parents'-basement place. A basement far away from any of your favorite places in teh world. So, so not good.

It's going to take some doing getting out of that one, but you can do it. We have friends that have managed it, but it takes quite a bit of self-acceptance and gear-switching. And flailing around. And getting help from psychologists, even, or at least finding inspiration in others.

[armoire-man.livejournal.com]

And you might talk to Timmy about it. He is our poster child for moving home in his late twenties, then finding a new life he actually likes in his thirties.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Ha. Funny. You write that like they're ever home to take calls. Or if they are home that they don't just avoid my calls.

[bureinato.livejournal.com]

We had an 11 year reunion that I skipped. Was recently talking to one of the 1/2 dozen folks I've kept in touch with. We've been debating whether there will be a 20, 21 or 22 year reunion. And if it's worth going to.

I say don't bother, but my 11 year reunion was at a really inconvenient time and rather expensive to attend.

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

Like you (judging by your description of your experiences), I was an outcast in high school. What was worse was that here in Ontario, at the time, we had a five-year high school program, and I wouldn't have been able to leave even if I had thought about the possibility because my parents didn't support me when I came to them with my problems.

That being said, I went to my high school reunion a couple of years ago (well, actually it was more like what armoire_man described above, an alumni party to celebrate the school's 100th anniversary), dreading the whole thing. I really only had two friends in high school, neither of whom I'd kept in touch with at all. However... I had a blast.

People mature. And they treated me like a fellow human being instead of the geek who was a year younger than all of them. Even the jock whom I'd had a crush on at the time. (And I actually told him so at the reunion. And he was appreciative. Well, not that appreciative. My life isn't a porn movie. ;) )

So even if high school was a miserable time for you, going back ten years later might prove to be less difficult than you anticipate. I'm sure their past ten years haven't all been filled with joy and bliss either. Some of them will have gotten fat, gone bald, or gotten chained down into dead-end careers with families they resent. Just keep that in mind. :)

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

There is also the gay going to a Catholic School reunion issue.