Back to School
Posted on October 13, 2007 Posted by John Scalzi 36 Comments
Can’t play today; attending 20th high school class reunion. Having fun, wish you were here. If, that is, you were a member of the Webb Class of ’87. Which statistically speaking, you probably weren’t. Sorry.
Ever go to a class reunion? Did you enjoy yourself? Talk amongst yourselves whilst I’m away.
Missed mine this year. F that S.
Like I need to see people who are selling insurance and gained weight like me. Or the women who are even hotter now than they were in ’87. And then endure hours of “Yoga, huh? That make you a hippie? Can you touch your dick with your nose?” And “A science fiction book, huh? So you’re still a geek, huh, fag?”
No. None for me, thanks.
I made certain to be 2,500 miles away.
Two or three people contacted me and were disappointed when I said I wasn’t coming. I told them I was crafting meaningful relationships with people via the internet and we could have our own little reunion without the $75 a head dinner fee. I never heard from them again.
Went to my 10 year high school reunion. Nothing much had changed.
Still way too much drinking and loudness and typical disdain for people.
Went to my high school class reunion in July – 50 years.
It was the first one that I’ve managed to make, and I found it interesting, even though I was surprised how many old people were attending. :-) It was a chance to meet some very nice people with whom I had unintentionally lost contact over the years, and the weekend was very enjoyable.
I was also interesting to see how many people have led lives very different than everyone had expected 50 years ago. In some cases, “average” students had done very impressive things with their lives, while some of the BMOC types had made an absolute disaster of their lives.
In most cases, people had ended up in careers very different than they had envisioned in high school. I was one of only a few who has spent the last 50 years doing exactly what I had in mind in high school – but most people seemed to have enjoyed their lives anyway, which is really the most important thing.
I visited my twentieth. The lady I attended with was astounded that a lot of them looked much older them me( ahem). One of my old buddies I wouldn’t have recognized if he hadn’t won for the male that had changed the most. He actually looked closer to sixty than thirty-eight. I don’t think I’ll be visiting any other reunions.
The high school I graduated from hasn’t had their act together to have a reunion yet. The reunion I’d like to go to is with the people I grew up with at the high school I moved away from.
Most of the people I want to keep in touch with I do. I’m not the greatest correspondent, but I am terribly sentimental.
I didn’t like all that many of my classmates when I was going to school with them, and I rather doubt I’d like them any better now.
Haven’t attended any of them. Haven’t felt the need to attend any of them.
Several years ago, one of my reunions was the same weekend as Rivercon. Guess where I was that weekend?
I was a member of the first graduating class of my high school (I started there as a sophomore in its first year of operation), and I graduated with a grand total of 16 other people.
The first reunion to be held by my school took place thirteen years after my graduation and included the three classes that followed mine. I went, I had a great time, and I have absolutely no idea if there’s been another reunion that inlcuded my class. (If so, I obviously didn’t attend…)
There are some folks I’d love to catch up with, but in general, the reunion idea leaves me pretty much cold.
Most of the people from my High School have found me on Facebook. I still don’t know if this is a good thing, seeing as I didn’t keep in touch with them to begin with, and dind’t miss them terribly.
They held our tenth year reunion last year, and no, I didn’t attend. Decided to go to Holland on vacation instead. According to some, it wasn’t all that great: slide show, alcohol, and regressing to 18 year old midsets. Fun times.
Hope you have fun at yours, though, John.
I went to #20 and #25. I was actually shocked at how old my classmates had become. There were two other people there who, like me, hadn’t radically changed in the intervening years. Honestly, my mirror hadn’t prepare me for what was going to happen. The three of us sort of crouched in a corner, asking each other “what happened to them?”
High school wasn’t a pleasant time for me… revisiting it is about as appealing as an elective root canal. I skipped my 10th and 20th, and I doubt the organizers could find me now since my mom and I have changed addresses a couple of times.
Missed my 40th this year with little concern. Good old Tipp City, Ohio can get along quite well without me and vice versa.
The last time I was there, met a few old acquaintances (notice: not friends). The ones who had left town and traveled were a pleasure to be around, the ones who had never left were still pains in the ass.
Sigh… and so it goes.
I graduated in 1962, and went to my 10-year reunion in 72. (We didn’t have a 5-year, which was by deliberate design.) One woman made the observation that a lot of the guys there had a lot more hair than at graduation, and the rest had a lot less. Another woman was disappointed that the governor was being so slow about establishing the position of state astrologer, which she saw as vitally important. That’s all I remember about that one.
I went to number 20, where the guidance counsellor immediately recognized me at more than twice the age I was when he had last seen me. He asked me about things we had talked about while I was a student, and about friends of mine who were not present. I don’t think the guy ever forgot anything or anybody. That’s all I remember about that reunion.
I haven’t bothered to attend any others. I still keep in close touch with one classmate out of the 540, and don’t really much care about the others. I was the boy in school that everybody hated because I excelled without really trying, the teachers (except the PE “coach”) liked me, and I was never in trouble.
I had my 25th year college reunion earlier this month, ya young whipper-snapper! Why, back in MY day, we had to…..ah, never mind, youth will never understand that hardships we older folks had to endure.
It surprised me how people I was in college with slipped back into many of the same great interactions (for lack of a better word). I mean, the same lingo, expressions, etc. Even with people I have not seen in the last 25 years…..it was a lot of fun going back there, it was even more fun coming back to what I have now.
Reunions can be great. (Mine was.) But life can be so much more fun….
Ah, enough of this…..
I went to my HS 10th. None of the people I really wanted to see were there, of course, but it was amusing to see how all the women had gotten fat and the men had mostly gone bald (I was fat to begin with, so seeing all the formerly skinny chicks looking for places to sit…. Mmm, schadenfreude pie was invented for just such bliss.) Also had a number of casual acquaintences come out as gay/lesbian, and was all I could do to bite my tongue and refrain from saying, “It took you this long to figure that out? We knew in high school…”
Ah well. Of such things are memories made.
My 20th isn’t until *mumble mumble several years from now* – I don’t know if I’m going to make it this time, but it would be good fun to see if anybody turned out successful after all.
Heh. My 15th is next weekend, and yes, I’m attending it. It doesn’t look like anyone I really want to see will be there, but as a whole our class was fairly close-knit. The 134 of us were the inaugural class of an experimental school.
Then there’s the high school I would’ve graduated from, had I not gone to the experimental school. I’ve not bothered trying to keep up with anyone from there, except for one friend whom I knew before we were in high school.
Have fun – try not to kill anyone with a pen!
I went to a small alternative high school full of freaks, geeks, artists, geniuses, and interesting screw-ups. We had a reunion this summer for everyone who attended during a 5 year block and it was awesome. Some people looked just the same, some had changed a lot, but everyone was recognizable. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
God, no. No reunions for me, thank you. My 20th will be next year, I suppose. I won’t be attending.
Here is the deal, there are a couple of people of whom I remember fondly and wouldn’t mind seeing again, but the vast majority of the 600 or so others, I simply can’t remember them. I draw a complete blank. My sister has gone to her reunions and she tells me about her classmates, some of which were siblings of mine, and I don’t remember them. Their names sound vaguely familiar but I can’t put a face to them, nor can I remember any details about them. So, it would be like attending a reunion with a bunch of strangers I don’t know, with the added embarrassment of the fact that I am supposed to know them.
And I wouldn’t even get the joy of seeing the popular girls who had gotten fat. I can’t remember much about who the popular girls were. I think it must be PTSD and I’ve shelved all those memories. No need to bring them up now for no good reason.
I went to my 10-year, uh, ten years ago. Had a surprisingly good time, too. The two people in my class that I hated the most while in school? We spent the whole day together, playing golf and having a smashing good time. The rest of the people there basically their high-school selves, only more-so.
Oddly enough, I never heard about a 10yr reunion happening, tho my pop lived right where I’d left him when I moved out for college. Somehow, after he had moved, they tracked me down for the 15th, but I was living many states away and really had no interest anyway.
If high school was the best of times, people apparently stopped living. There was little there socially that I wanted to remember.
I skipped my 10 year HS, 10 year college, and will not be coming back for my 20 year HS next year either. I’m actually in Oregon (where I grew up and went to school) right now, as I type this. I visited my university – you just can’t go home, can you? Only one CS professor that I had courses with, buildings had changed, and as beautiful as it was, all the young, attractive people reminded me just how old I’m getting.
By contrast, the fact that I was in town after 11 years away brought every “near” relative to my parents’ house for dinner last Thursday. My sister declared that it was like a funeral – that she had not expected to see all of us siblings under the same roof until someone had died.
I went to my 20th high school reunion: (a) out of a sense of curiosity — having gone to college out of state, I’ve had essentially zero contact with any of my high school associates, but I had been a Yearbook Head Photographer, so I was always recording what others did, rather than participating in what they did; (b) it was the weekend we were heading to Atlanta anyway for the 1996 Summer Olympics, and we had tickets to four Week 2 events; (c) gave us an excuse to detour over to Greensboro NC, rather than do the West Michigan to Atlanta direct trip, and visit the ‘rents.
Interesting experience — I’ll check them out again at the 50th…
Go Whirlies!
Dr. Phil
I only graduated in June, so there’s been no high school reunions to go to. However, I’ll probably not go to my high school reunions because of the distain i had for the class of 2007…
I hate teenagers.
Whether or not there was anything I could do about it I was mostly treated like a joke in high school (Nordonia (Northfield-Macedonia, Ohio), Class of ’77); I ‘ve had no great desire to revisit the experience.
I have a 20th HS reunion coming up next summer, and I am dreading the idea of it. (This will be the first reunion we’ve had.)
I hated high school and hate even thinking about it. However, there were only 42 people in my graduating class, and one of those people is my sister-in-law’s neighbor, so it feels rude if I say, “Hell no I don’t want to go!”
But on the other hand, one of my classmates died last year (cancer) and that was a bit of a shock.
Thing is, I don’t know if I am afraid of going because I how unhappy high school made me, or because everyone will think I’m a failure.
It all depends how you want to measure success and failure. Are you happy with your life now? If so, who cares whether you’ve found fame and fortune? Why does it have to depend on how much money you have?
I edit the reunion newsletters for my high school class. It’s a great way for me to keep tabs without actually having to talk to anyone – they send their written blurbs directly to me. ;)
John,
If you had not gone to Webb, which high school would have been your local one?
Like many people here, I did not go to my 10-year reunion. I was in North Carolina, it was in Southeast Missouri, and I never socialized a lot with those people. In 1999, the year of my 20th, I was in Southern Illinois, only 150 miles away, so I went. I recognized maybe one of five people there without help. But I surprised myself by having a good time. Enough of a good time that I’ll be heading back to Kennett in a couple of years for my 30th.
One of the reasons that I don’t go is because it is never in my home town. Once it was in, I believe, Orange County and the other time in Palm Springs. Since I grew up and went to high school in Covina, CA, neither was particularly close.
Have it near the actual place we went to high school and I might be persuaded to attend. Or not.
MWT,
Just to clarify, I don’t think I’m a failure. I am both happy and content with my life. But I went to a private Catholic school, where money and physical looks were very important, and I don’t look forward to spending an evening or weekend or whatever justifying my life choices.
That’s enough to make anyone depressed and insecure. :)
Ah, excellent. :)
And yeah. I have that same problem with most of my extended family. Money seems to be the only thing they want to measure success by (if not by jobs then by how much expensive travel they can afford), and physical appearance in terms of how well they can dress. (I’m a marine scientist for a reason. We make no money and don’t care about dressing up. ;) )
If you do end up going, cheer up – it’s only for a couple of days, and then you can forget all about them and go back to your own life and ignoring them again. :)
Being fannish (book-fan, smart, fat, et.c.) in high school meant I didn’t get along well with most of my classmates. However, I’ve been to all of my reunions and even built little Web sites for them. I think it’s mostly because I’m very curious by nature. What happened to those folks? I live 550 miles away from my high school, so it’s not like I run into any of them normally.
The weirdest thing is that people who were not great students but who were social butterflies almost all became teachers. Most of the smart folks headed for high tech jobs.
The kid who was most likely to become a used car salesman became a used car salesman. The women who really wanted to become mothers almost all became mothers.
OTOH, one genial shop guy became the first class millionaire because he invented some stuff and opened his own company.
Jim was like me (well, not a girl or fat but he was also a class outcast). While he lives near his school, he’s never been to a reunion. He graduated from a very poor school, and, except for the kid who became a celebrity hairstylist, may be about the msot well-off person from his class. I think he should go back and gloat (and, besides, he still has most of his hair ;->), but he says he’d rather not.
Deliberately avoided my 10th (still too bitter about the experience) but will most likely attend the 20th this summer. My wife says that there are some I would still like to see, and that it is a good thing to put bitterness behind me. I think she is right, though. I didn’t have any special dislike for any of my classmates or teachers, just a low level unpleasantness for 4 years, wrapped up by way too much personal drama my senior year. (The exception being my wife of 18 Years who was my high school sweetheart.)
We had a five year reunion at a campground that was an alcohol-washed occasion for people who hadn’t had the courage to ‘hook up’ during high school to do so. I don’t know if we had a tenth- I was out of the country that year.
Our 20th was OK- we lost a few guys to HIV in the late ’80s, and they were missed. Same stuff- how some people got fat, bald, or fat and bald; a couple of late-blooming swans, etc. The cluster of friends that I had hung out with became generally successful and seemed pretty happy.
Our 25th is next year, and they’re planning something. I’ll probably go.