11/30/99

I got my digital camera today! Isn't this a beautiful picture of my refrigerator! I'm so excited! Now if only I had anything to take a picture of, I'd be all set...

I just wrote this big long "meta" diary thing, but I decided to move it to a separate page. Go here if you want to read it.

So, my high school reunion. I'd heard a lot about what to expect from various people. My mother told me that everyone would look old and be fat, and that I'd have nothing in common with them anymore, but none of these statements actually turned out to be true.

I've actually stayed in pretty close touch with most of my close high school friends, and I think we all had some trepidation about actually walking in to the reunion on our own, so we decided to congregate beforehand and then carpool over together. The reunion was held on the UMass campus, so our ostensible reason for going together was to ensure safety from the rapist who's been terrorizing the otherwise pastoral campus this semester. But since the rapist apparently only strikes on Tuesdays, and this was a Friday night, it wasn't really a legitimate reason. What we really wanted was a group of people to walk in with, and the assurance that we could drink heavily if we felt the need to do so.

But you know, it really wasn't bad at all. It was, we all agreed, a bit strange, though, being around all those people who you associate with a long-gone stage in your life. Maybe it was weirder for us than for most people because we all grew up in a small town, and had known many of the people in that room since elementary school or even earlier. Since high school, I've moved around a lot, switched jobs...

Ooh, weird. While I was writing this, "Party of Five" came on, guest starring my high school classmate Eric Mabius (he's playing Neve Campbell's boyfriend's college-aged son [though he actually must be 28 or 29]. And no, he wasn't at the reunion).

So, as I was saying, my school probably occupies an unusually large portion of my psyche, if only because I spent far more time there than anyplace else.

Anyway, you know how people sometimes will say that they wish they could go back and relive parts of their lives knowing what they know now? Well, that's pretty much what your high school reunion allows you to do...at least socially.

Some of my other friends clearly viewed it that way, too. My friend Maggie who was rather shy and retiring back in school, was, in the words of another classmate, "the belle of the ball," charming all the guys in the room, including the "popular" guys who she never would have dared speak to much less flirt with back in the day.

However, those old social hierarchies were still felt by a lot of people, including Maggie, who told me "as soon as I.S. (a "popular" girl) walked in the room, I just had this visceral reaction of fear. I couldn't even remember her name, but I was just overcome by this feeling!"

I can honestly say that I didn't really feel constrained by the old hierarchies, and talked to almost everyone in the room during the course of the evening. People really seemed not to have changed much, and contrary to my mother's predictions, most people looked better, if anything. My friend Seth's assessment was that "all the guys look a little bit worse, and all the women look beautiful." It wasn't 100% true, but some of the guys did look a bit worse for the wear, having gained weight, lost hair etc.

In contrast, most of the women did look better than they had back in high school, with a large percentage of us coming back thinner and blonder, with better-shaped eyebrows (all three of these things are true in my case). Of course, as my friend Lani astutely pointed out, the "thinner" part was kind of hard to tell "because when we were in high school [the late 80's], it was fashionable to wear really baggy clothes."

I hardly took any pictures or swapped any addresses, although I brought my camera and a pen and paper. Nobody else was doing it, so I felt a bit weird about it. A few people did come up and tell me that they'd seen my website, and I gave the URL to a couple of others. I also spoke to one of my classmates who authors the illustrious Amherst Police Report, and he's going to try to send along future editions to me so I can update it.

Some people were freaked out by the fact that many of our classmates are now married and have children (most of my close friends are still single, and none of them have kids yet). This didn't really bother me. I already knew I was old.

I guess the only really weird thing was the nature of my interactions with everyone. Every conversation was weirdly intense, but oddly stereotyped and unsubstantive. Practically every person I saw, I would hug (I even hugged people who I'd barely spoken to in high school). Then we'd go through our respective spiels (by the end of the evening, I'd heard these so many times that I was doing other people's spiels for them: "Archana is living in Manhattan, and is in her second year of business school at NYU, Josh is in his 5th year of graduate school for computer science at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Cristina is a paralegal living in Amherst."

But our conversations only rarely went beyond the spiel and a few comments about each others' appearances and speculatively gossiping about other classmates.

I think I was overdressed for the event, but a few other people were, too, so it was OK. I was wearing a dress so low-cut that I had to put concealer on my chest to cover up the few little blemishes I have there. This led me to the realization that the skin on my face is a couple of shades darker than the skin on my chest so the concealer didn't really look very good. However, the dress was a hit with at least one guy, who sidled up to me, gave me a sleazy look, put his arm around me, and whispered in my ear "I know I never even talked to you in high school, but (and here he paused to look me up and down) you're hot." As he spoke, I could feel the alcohol from his breath making my nose tingle. It was completely disgusting, but also sort of funny. "Um, thanks," I replied, and then moved as far away from him as possible. Yeccch.

I also got the opportunity to speak to one of my two big high school crushes. He's an actor living in New York now, and told me that he now likes to smoke a lot of pot, which made me totally not attracted to him anymore. But I still had a good time talking to him...his sense of humor is extremely similar to mine, which is rare. I told him that he'd given me my first kiss. "Oh yeah?" he asked "so have you had any others since then?"

"Nope," I told him, "that was the only one."