As I prepare for my twentieth (dear god I'm getting old!) High School reunion, I have found that a lot of my former classmates have become far more "normal" than I thought they were. In my high school, like all high schools I suppose, there were the normal cliques. There were your jocks, your preps, your prep jocks, nerds, freaks, band geeks, choir peeps, the uppity goodie-too-shoes, and all the others. Now some of you may be shocked by this, but I probably fell more into the freak category than anything else, I know, I know I'm sure you are saying to yourselves, "Jason, this can't be, you are such a "well-adjusted" adult!" Utter sarcasm aside, I was a freak, I didn't fit in well, rebelled against authoritative rules, etc… I attribute part of this to my home life, and part of it too just not giving a damn what people thought of me after a while. You see I was one of those teens that now a days would probably end up expelled and arrested for my "hobbies". I mean it's not every day that a high school junior or senior brings fencing foils and swords to be stowed away in their locker until after school for fencing and swordplay. Yes, I was one of those! I played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (none of that babyish regular D&D for me!), Magic the Gathering, watched the Highlander more times then I care to admit (even with the cheesy 80's era graphics it was a damn good movie!). I took part in some very, very questionable pranks, some of which may still get me in legal trouble if anyone ever knew the details! In short, I was a school administrator's worst nightmare… not to mention I know I caused my parents many nervous evenings of listening to the police scanner wondering if I was involved with what they were hearing about the police discussing!
I began to notice I was "different" very quickly after starting Plymouth High school in the fall of 1989 (damn just typing that makes me feel like an old fogey!) I didn't really seem to care about the same stuff as most of my classmates. It also didn't help that over the summer between my 8th grade year and my freshman year I grew around 8 inches, (my knees still hurt from that) my eyesight was beginning to betray me, although at the time I didn't realize it/was in denial, I was of course skinny, I mean I was a teen ager who grew 8 inches in a 3 month period, what did I expect? Anyway, I didn't fit in with the jocks because I had no interest in most sports. I didn't fit in with the preps because I was poor. I didn't fit in with the Band and choir folks at the time, because I was about as musically talented as a cat in heat with its tail caught in a door. I didn't really fit in with the geeks because I didn't care enough about grades to bother trying… after 8 years of elementary and Junior high with good to decent grades and a father who only ever saw the negatives (at least to me at the time it was the only thing he ever saw) I just quit bothering to try and get good grades, I could do it, fairly easily even, but I just didn't try. Now I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but I'm a fairly intelligent person, in some ways it could be stated that I'm brilliant in a savant'ish sort of way, but I just didn't see the point. At that particular time in my life I couldn't see past the next few years of my life, too be brutally honest I didn't think I'd live this long, but that has been touched on in a couple other posts.
So there I was, a freshman that didn't fit in anywhere well, I know it's the most original story ever, right? Any way I made some friends, made a few enemies, some accidentally, others, not so much, but I had people to talk to. As I grew older and we all began advancing through the grades I noticed that some, a very small few, in my eyes at the time, of the more prep'ish group seemed to be growing more tolerant of my freakish ways. Some of the Jocks started to pay more attention to some of us freaks, and not the "we are going to kick your ass for being a freak type of attention". By the time we reached senior year, most of my class had already graduated to the "just don't give a shit" phase of our youth. It was a good time to be an angst ridden teenager, I mean we had the grunge scene exploding all over, people like Kurt Cobain telling us that we really weren't bad, or wrong in our ways, that it really was "normal".
My senior year I had study hall first thing in the morning for the second half of the year. In the infinite wisdom of our study hall teacher, they placed all of the seniors above everyone else on two or three tables on the "stage" of the cafeteria. Now this meant that there were one of two or three activities going on during study hall; Sleeping, I personally took advantage of this activity on a fairly regular basis, (sorry to all my classmates who had to listen to me snore!) what I like to call the Exchange (more on this in a moment) and then there was the listening to music and sending out underclassmen to get donuts and McMuffins. Now the Exchange activity was a rather perfect setup, one that I'm sure almost every high school in America has. What would commence during the "exchange" portion of study hall went something like this: "Who did the econ assignment?" some of the others at the table would respond in the positive or negative, and on more than one occasion "What econ assignment?" Then we would all run down the list of the other assignments, and "exchange" what we had done for what others had done. This activity is where I began to see glimmerings of some of the caste system breaking down, with some of the "preps" happily exchanging homework with a freak like me, sometimes even chatting and bantering about classes and what not. Now I was, and still am, a rather untrusting, suspicious kind of person (This comes from a long history of getting smacked down by life, seeing my father get screwed over time and time again by being overly trusting, etc…) I was extremely cautious about these interactions, as I was always waiting for the vicious teasing and ripping to begin. After a while I started to get the sneaking suspicion that maybe, just maybe they weren't all out to make my life more hellish than it already was!
Fast forward five years after graduation. I saw somewhere that there were plans for a 5 year reunion… I personally thought that 5 years was nowhere near enough time to make me want to spend time with most of my classmates again, I mean the ones I wanted to associate with I still talked to, and the ones I didn't, well, I didn't like them then, why the hell would I want to spend my free time with them now! I didn't even respond; IIRC the reunion ended up canceled for lack of response, leave it to the grunge generation to not even bother responding to reunion invites. I took this as a sign that the rest of my classmates must be in agreement with me that 5 years was just not enough time. Fast forward a "few" more years I, like everyone else in the known world, spend too much of my time on Facebook. I start seeing some of my classmates on FB, start friending some of them, find out that they too have the same crap going on that I do, too much work, not enough time, children, houses, pets, spousal nightmares, etc…. I start to cautiously friend some of those that I always assumed looked down upon me, thought me to be below them, etc… Well what do you know, some of them were actually happy to chat, share experiences, opinions, and everything else you could think of… in short they were normal people. Now I'm no social butterfly, but at the same time I'm not a pariah either, and I have a myriad of friends and acquaintances, but I just never thought that my high school classmates would ever change, I know, that's a narrow minded, short-sighted way to think, but sometimes even the most enlightened people stumble around in the dark because they are too damn stubborn to turn on the light! I have found that many of my classmates share many of my personal political beliefs, not all of them, some are diametrically opposed to my views, and that's OK (OK, OK, it's really not, it shall be my viewpoint and my viewpoint alone! Yeah, I know, I'm an ass! LOL just kidding with you all, if we all agreed on everything life would be boring as hell.) Most of us have all grown, learned from our experiences, and some have even realized that they were not very good people back then, hell, I know that 90% of the time I was just a pissed off punk, who would sooner take a dump on you than talk to you as a normal human being. I'd like to think I've grown and matured since then, now don't get me wrong there are still some people that I'd sooner shit on then talk to, but for the most part I'm a mellow middle aged mad man! A few months back I login to my FB wall and low and behold I've got multiple invites to our 20 year reunion. My first thought, was nah, someone must have made a mistake, and surely it couldn't be twenty years, could it? My steel trap mind quickly did the math, triumphantly I knew there was a mistake, it had only been 10 years… then I remembered the year was 2013 and quietly sobbed on the inside! I clicked on the link and did a quick recon of the posts that were there… looking for the tell-tale snobbish remarks, the uppity "I'm better than you and always will be" tone, and the dreaded everyone is welcome except for you mentality. To my shock I found none of that, I found some of the people I had friended over the years saying that they were going to go, some that I had only just recently started talking to, finding out that they had been reading this little slice o' mental masturbation that is my blog, and generally people just wanting to reconnect. I discussed attending with my wife, which meant I basically just told her that my 20th HS reunion was coming up and being as vague as only a middle aged madman can be. I thought about it, I stuck it in the back of my mind and would poke at the idea of attending, as if it was some odd, unknown creature that you poke with a stick to see if it is alive and if it wants to eat your face off for fun! Around this same time, our foreign exchange student from my senior came back to the states, now since I hadn't seen her since graduation, and I had very strong feelings for her, I had to go and meet her back in Plymouth. It was a delightful time, and I found it very relaxing and somewhat therapeutic. In talking with her, the idea of this blog actually came into being, she inspired me to give it a try, as she has a couple of blogs that I had perused in the past. That experience, coupled with the beginning of this blog and the responses I had received from writing it compelled me to take the why not attitude and decide to attend my high school reunion.
Now as the event draws near there are of course the normal mundane issues to deal with, do I just drive up, attend the reunion and drive back? I'm thinking not, as it's a 3 hour drive one way, and it would make for one very tedious day. OK, so I'm going to stay overnight, great, except for one little problem… My home town has a very large festival every year… guess which weekend the reunion is on? Winner, winner chicken dinner! It is on the same weekend, now I fully understand the reasoning for this, as it is a two bird's one stone issue, but it makes trying to get a hotel room within a 30 mile radius a real bitch! Now I could easily get a room if I wanted to spend $200 – $325 for a single night, and while I've been mildly successful in my life, I refuse to spend that many clams on Plymouth Indiana, sorry to all that stayed there and love it, but hell no! I didn't spend that much a night in Vegas, I'll be damned if I spend that much on Plymouth! Then there of course was the initial logistical decisions, what to do with children, going solo, or wife attending, etc. etc... In the end it was decided I would be going solo, that then negates the childcare dilemma and simplifies life. On top of those issues are the other more emotional issues, will I still be the outsider looking in? Will I still fit in as well as a hunchback at a chiropractor's convention? Will anyone remember me? Will anyone talk to me? How long do I have to endure the uncomfortable silences before I snap, and start drinking heavily (Oh, forgot to mention that of course there will be a cash bar to socially lubricate the situation, methinks I will be bringing one of my flasks, otherwise I may go broke!)? Oh well, I guess I'll get the answers to these and other breathtaking questions in eleven days!
Till then, Live your life to its fullest, 'cause no one gets out alive!
