Reunions

High School reunions are an interesting thing. Thanks to facebook many of us already know what our classmates are up to. We know who got married, who has kids and who are still living in our hometown. Although even though I am facebook friends with a couple people from high school, some of them still don't know much about me. Case in point, one of them thought I flew across the country to attend. Nope, just drove 45 minutes.

Anyway, I was excited to go to mine to see people that I knew in high school with. What I find most interesting is seeing if people have changed and seeing people who think they have changed but really haven't. I was genuinely interested in seeing some people.  I'm not going to lie, part of the reason why was to show people I didn't grow up to be a complete loser and look, I even got married! Now, I didn't really have that many friends in high school. I had a couple girls I was friendly with but for the most part they hung out with each other and never really with me. I was the shy kid who was a bit of a homebody and not having a boyfriend in high school, I didn't really have a lot in common with them.

Anyway, these girls are still friends with each other (and some of the other people in the group) in real life as well. I haven't seen anyone I graduated with since I left for college so I was looking forward to seeing them specifically. We're friends on facebook so I had an idea of what they'd been up to.  The last time I saw them, we were hanging out before we all left home, going through our yearbook and they were making fun of people who were all going to the same college, staying in their same cliques and whatnot. I knew when I said goodbye to them that day that I couldn't wait to get to college and meet new people. Stuff like that just isn't something I am interested in doing. If 10 of you decided to go to the same state school, good for you. I'm not going to pass judgement on going to the same school as your friends.

When I saw the RSVP list, I was excited to see these two girls since it had been so long.  One of them I had known since kindergarten and our friendship waned as we got into high school. Even though we are friends on facebook, she wasn't aware of how close we lived to each other. We exchanged phone numbers so we'll see if anything comes from this.  At some point during the evening, these girls got bored with each other, because well, they still see each other on a somewhat regular basis so there was less to catch up on. They decided to go around to some of the more snobby people and see if they were still the same people. I suspect alcohol may have had something to do with this decision. But this also proves my point that you really aren't that much different than who you were in high school. I really don't see the point in this behavior. Maybe I'm an old fuddy-duddy, I dunno. But if I didn't talk to you at all in high school, I'm not going to seek you out now. I didn't go to my reunion to see if you are still a mean girl. Now, did I stand back and observe people and see that yes, you are still a jerk? Yes but I didn't do anything about it. I made my decisions just based on watching you interact with your friends. Does that make me now much better than these two girls? Maybe, maybe not, I'm not sure.

There were some people that I had classes with or worked on a project with or just had some interactions with that I did talk to that night. If we saw each other, there was a quick hello and I even caught up with my old lab partner from my junior year. We didn't exactly get along part of the time but guess what, when she came over to talk to me, she seemed genuinely interested to talk to me. And for that reason, I was genuinely interested in talking to her. There was no agenda, I wasn't talking to her to see if she was still mean, and we were friendly to each other. Am I going to hang out with her now? No but that's not the point. It was just nice to talk to her and see where she is now 10 years later.

Some of us gained maturity in the 10 years since I graduated and some of us haven't. I don't think going around talking to random people seeing if they've changed at all show maturity. I think it shows the exactly opposite. But this didn't ruin reunions for me. I'm still going to go to my high school reunions but I am hoping to see more people at the 15 just to see more people.