We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby

Back from the reunion, dear readers, and I promised stories!

Overall, I must say that the reunion was more fun and not at all traumatizing like I imagined, and I’m very glad I went because I think I’ve laid rest to a few of my neuroses – it’s about time!

As you know, I had worked myself up into a near panic over the horror of going to the reunion by myself.  And yet, in the end, I was actually really happy to be there on my own and to be able to talk to everyone I wanted to without torturing somone else!  (Case in point – my friend A.’s husband spent most of the evening by the bar getting progressively more drunk.) 

And even more than feeling ok being there by myself, I felt genuinely ok being single.  It was good to see people, and it was good to catch up.  Most everyone looks great (the girls more so than the guys, actually), and seems happy with whatever they are doing.  But listening to everyone talk about their lives, there isn’t anyone I’d want to switch places with, for all the husbands and babies and all that.   There isn’t anyone I’d rather be than who I am right now.  Which is not to say that my life is perfect – it is a work in progress, of course – but it’s my own.   And I wouldn’t have it any other way. 

On another note, at the risk of sounding narcissistic, several people told me I looked great, and for once I believed them!  I don’t even mind that I was sort of nerdy in high school because I’d so much rather look better in my 20’s/30’s than have peaked in high school.   (On a related note: they were showing videos of school assemblies from our senior year, and in one of them I and the rest of the cast of Steel Magnolias, which I had a lead role in, had to do a little dance in front of the WHOLE SCHOOL to “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”  I was mortified watching this.  I was such a dork, I was wearing a totally fugly sweater, a black skirt and black tights.  Oh, how happy I am not to be in HS anymore!)

Anyway, the most entertaining encounter of the evening was with a guy named KM.  Before my mom became a professor, she was a 5th grade teacher at a different elementary school than the one I went to, but one that fed into the same high school as mine.  So one class of my mom’s students ended up being in my graduating class.  One such guy was KM.  My mom loved him, and I thought he was totally cute in high school, but he never ever gave me the time of day. 

This weekend I was showing my mom the Facebook photos of some of my high school friends and some of her former students, including KM.  She requested that if he were at the reunion, that I get a picture with him.  (I thought yeah right…I’m going to ask a guy who barely spoke to me in high school for a photo.)

Later in the evening, A. and I were getting a second drink at the bar when a guy we didn’t recognize started chatting with us.  (Not to digress too much, but this guy was in the running for the biggest douche in the universe prize.  He kept appearing all night with such winning lines as “I’m a corporate lawyer and a professional asshole.”  No shit, Sherlock.)  Anyway, I asked him whose husband he was and he said no, he was a friend of KM’s.

Right.  I spotted KM and smiled, and he gave me a quizzical look like he was trying to place me and I figured that was that.

But later in the night I was in a circle of people and KM snaked up behind me, started running his hand all over my back, and said “You look so beautiful.”  Then he told me that he’d seen some pictures of me on Facebook, and commented, “You just got back from a trip, right?”  I responded with, “Oh yeah, I saw some pictures of you too.  And your really cute girlfriend.”  Then he got all weird and was like, “Oh, that;s just a girl I used to date…it’s complicated.”  (Who puts pictures of an ex on Facebook?)

He came up to me several more times, his eyes looking more glazed and drunk by the minute, touching my back and saying I was beautiful.  He was like “we need to catch up!  Give me the update!”  But of course, when  tried to ask what he was up to, he’d give totally evasive answers like “Just living the dream!”  Then he’d say “we should go to a quiet corner to catch up…we keep getting interrupted.”

It was such a funny feeling, to have a guy I used to think was so hot (and who is still quite good looking) be trying to put the sleaze moves on me, and I just stood there thinking “Ugh, pathetic.”

I figured I might as well make my mom happy so this wouldn’t be a total waste, so I asked KM to take a photo with me along with another of her former students (who is now a math teacher and football coach at our high school and is totally the wholesome young teacher who all the girls must have crushes on).  KM then launched into, I love your mom.  If I could date your mom, I totally would.  Your mom is such a panther.

A PANTHER?

Yeah, you know, a panther.  30 to 39 is a Puma.  40 to 49 is a Cougar.  50 to 59 is a Panther.  And 60 and up is a Silver Panther.

Oh holy mother of god.  Yes, he actually called my sweet, innocent mom a Panther.  Happily, her other student was looking suitably skeeved/horrified.

I told my mom this and she cracked up.  If I had known he was like that, I would never have had you talk to him, she said.

I wonder if she’s flattered to be called a Panther?

Homeward Bound

Home, where my thought’s escaping…

Isn’t my hometown pretty?  I don’t have any plans to move back to Oregon, but sometimes I really do miss it.

I will be blog-free for a few days, but I promise a full report on all things reunion when I return!  xoxo!

Flashing Back

These are scary times, dear readers.  Politically, economically, things are more than unstable.   I’m sure at some point I will write about all of that, because you’d best believe it’s been on my mind.  But for now, I am going to try to stay in denial and write about a different time in my life.  Because in a few days I will be traveling in a time machine, back to 1998.

That’s right – I’m talking about my ten year high school reunion.

What was SF like in high school, you ask?

I was smart.  I was awkward.  I was dying to fit in.  I wore baggy sweaters and flannel shirts my freshman year because I wanted to be like Angela Chase on My So-Called Life.  I was boy-crazy.  I was in theater.  I had long straight hair and bangs.  I studied a lot.  When I was 15, I tried to befriend the popular girls by going to JV basketball games with them.  I never became a so-called popular girl.  I didn’t swear, drink, or have sex.  I hated doing anything athletic.  When I was 16, I thought I was in love with a boy who was Mormon and I went to church with him.  When I was 17, I dated a boy from the “wrong side of the tracks” and took him to prom with me.  He dumped me in favor of a girl who would put out.  When I was 18, I fell in love with C.  When they handed out joke awards in the drama department, I got the “Sorry I’m such a sweetheart” award.  I wanted nothing more than to be swept off my feet.

My, my, how times have changed.  But sometimes, I still feel like that Oregon high school girl.

And on Saturday, I’ll be going to some new restaurant/bar in Eugene that I’ve never heard of, and I’ll be seeing a lot of people who haven’t seen me since I stopped being that girl.  And even though my life has come so far since 1998, when I think about going back and seeing all those people, I feel like maybe I haven’t let go of all those old stupid high school insecurities.

(Random non sequitur: I am watching Fringe, and Joshua Jackson is even hotter now than he was on Dawson’s Creek.  Rowrrr.)

Anyway, I know that the mild dread I feel about going to my reunion is silly.  I have a good life.  I have great friends.  I have a good job.  (I’m a frickin’ lawyer in Los Angeles, man!) 

But there’s that needling part of me that wishes I were …well, while I’m being honest, let’s be honest… less single.  (Or maybe supermodel gorgeous.  That would work too.)  I know I’m going to be meeting a lot of husbands and wives, and seeing a lot of baby photos, and even at the same time that I know that things happen in their own time and blah blah blah, I still have that slight feeling of Why isn’t that me?  And it will be even more exaggerated because instead of, for example, Facebook, where I can look at the husbands and wives and babies from the comfort of my couch, I will actually have to face the reunion alone in a sea of couples.

*Shudder*

Now, of course, I signed myself up for this, so I obviously feel that the pros of seeing some of the people I am excited to see outweigh the cons.   And at the end of the day, it will probably be fun to a degree.  I just need to remember this isn’t high school anymore.

I mean, I’m grown up now…right?