If Nostalgia Is For Chumps, Then I Guess I'm a Chump

Listen up, Drunkards.

My 30-year high school reunion is this year.

Me, typing my senior English paper. (I graduated a bit early.)

Thirty years. There is no freaking way it's been 30 years since I graduated from high school.

On the other hand, hell yeah, I graduated in 1985. Which, objectively speaking, is the greatest year in the history of the Gregorian calendar.

When people who could make their hair do this
ruled the Earth. (Spoiler alert: I wasn't one of them.)

We had "We Are the World."
We had Live Aid.

We had Back to the Future, Goonies, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Witness, and The Sure Thing.

Which means I've been in love with John Cusack for 30 years.

We had MTV before the "M" stood for "Moronic."

This image IS the 80s.

Now, before you get the idea that I was the poster child for the Crazy Eighties, let me set you straight. I was a shy, chunky, awkward, moody loser in high school. I was obsessed with Bob Dylan, I scribbled poetry and song lyrics in notebooks during class, I didn't wear the right clothes or hang out in the right places.

Every nerd on "Square Pegs" was
cooler than I was.

On the positive side, I was blessed with a very small, very close group of friends who somehow loved me for who I was and made who I was even better. Bestest Friend became my bestest friend in our junior year of high school, and 31 years later, she still saves me from myself on a regular basis.

Anyway, back to the reunion.

I don't plan to attend.

I went to my 10-year reunion. It was...meh. On the plus side, I got a lot thinner and cuter in the decade after high school, and yeah, the double-takes I got from some people felt pretty damn good, I must admit. On the minus side, most of the people who attended the reunion were not my friends in high school and weren't about to become my friends just because we spent a weekend making small talk.

Also, I attended the funeral of one of my classmates the same weekend as the reunion. Kind of cast a pall on the whole idea of reunions in general.

And now we're all in our late 40s. I don't even want to think about how many divorces and plastic surgeries the Class of '85 has amassed. In a way I suppose I might derive pleasure from seeing how the jocks and the cheerleaders and the cool kids have become so many middle-aged suburbanites with middle-aged suburbanite problems. But not really. What's the point? I'm pretty comfortable in my skin, so why would I wish anything different for them?

Schadenfreude just seems like an invitation to bad karma.

There is, however, one condition under which I might consider attending.

It has to do with an amazing coincidence and an elusive opportunity to do something different the second time around.

I'll tell you about it tomorrow.