PTSD

Why I don't miss Snoop Dog

Right, I promised our loyal reader a report on the Great High School Reunion of 2005.

In my usual fashion, I’ve spent the past three months freaking out about it. Have I accomplished enough in ten years? Is anyone going that I want to see? How did they manage to find me? Should I buy a new car to drive to the reunion? A new house to live in? Is it acceptable for me to take photos of *other* people’s houses and cars and children to show these people? And why, for the love of all that’s holy, do I have NOTHING to wear?

You’ll notice that nowhere in this set of hysterical reactions is there any mention of going on a diet in order to look thinner than I did at graduation. See, I was freaked, not certifiable. Besides, when stressed I tend to eat cake. And pie. And cinnamon rolls. And whatever else doesn’t crawl away from me when I open the refrigerator.

Also, my idea of a great outfit involves lots of cleavage, and let’s face it, skinny girls just don’t have the same, umm, gifts.

So I failed to get skinny, which was just as well because nearly everyone else had used the past ten years to join me in the land of Krispy Kreme and control top pantyhose. To the three who managed to fit back into their homecoming dresses I say, “Come on in, the water’s fine! And you get to eat fried cheese!”

Fried cheese would have been better than the food they actually served. If I had to guess, I’d say the catering theme was “orange.” And they ran out of beer at 9:15, forcing the guy in charge (who now looks like Garth Brooks during his chipmunk phase, even though I had a huge crush on him in fourth grade) to take up a collection for more kegs. Luckily my mother suggested that we take along an emergency bottle of vodka. “Because you never want to run out of alcohol at a reunion. Trust me, you’ll need a drink.”

Returning to the hysteria: it turns out that the new house and car weren’t necessary, since no one got past the questions about how old my kids are.

It isn’t that I don’t like kids, it’s just that I like them a lot better when I can send them home to their parents. No, actually, it *is* that I don’t like kids. Unless I like the parents, and that’s a pretty small group of people. I can think of maybe a dozen kids that I like (and now you’re going to wander off to figure out which kids didn’t make the list). Half of them are related to me. Now that my friends are all breeding, I suppose I’ll have to up my limit.

So the questions about children were annoying, at best, and painful, at worst. My favorite answer? “Twelve, but we’re thinking of having a few more so that we can buy the 18 count egg cartons.” I’m just not ready to have the pitter-patter of little feet waking me up on a Saturday morning. It’s bad enough that I have cats.

The outfit turned out to be fine, with a bit of last minute shopping. It was the rare zero-tat ensemble (How rare? My wedding dress showed three, and there were two on display at last week’s Small Regional Conference) in deference to the land of the Republicans. Cute, not too trendy, and comfortable. Much better than that worn by the girl who was my best friend in grade school, made me miserable in middle school, and has now grown too busty for the red handkerchief and fringe halter dress that she wore to do the splits during “Achy Breaky Heart.”

I vaguely remember a conversation in which several of us, former and not-so-former geeks all, flashed through our ink collections and compared notes on “great tattoo shops I have seen.” I’m hoping I didn’t scare anyone.

What does that leave? Oh, right, the age-old question of whether I’ve accomplished anything since graduation. Let’s see:

1) I’m in the 22nd grade. (No, I’m not counting kindergarten. It doesn’t have a number.)
2) I have a lovely set of degrees, none of which I’m using. (How much do I remember them? Someone else had to bring my JD up in conversation Saturday. I was trying to avoid the inevitable lawyer jokes.)
3) My checking account is overdrawn about once every three months. Twice in the summer.
4) I still think a good game of Risk is evidence that a party is really going well.
5) Have I mentioned that I have no children, and can barely tolerate the care and feeding of cats?
6) I am currently in the middle of the prospectus that never ends.
7) I write about a topic that makes my uber-geeky colleagues yawn, let alone that guy I knew in high school who is now in advertising. (But he works on the campaigns for Duck tape! How cool is that?)
8) The thought of random conversations with people I don’t know well still makes me break out in hives.

To recap: I’m fat, childless, poor, overeducated, and just as shy as I was in high school. But I’ve gotten better at hiding it. Good thing no one from high school has the faintest idea about what I do. [More on the identity whiplash *that* involved in a later post.]

I have a great haircut, a husband who loves me (he disagrees with the fat comment, but admits that I’m overeducated), friends who listen to me even if they don't care all that much about what I'm saying, and my brother thinks I’m a good role model. For what, I don’t know.

Turns out I don’t really care that much about people I haven’t seen since 1995, and I’m pretty confident that the friends I keep in touch with have gotten used to my eccentricities by now. The best part of the reunion was the trip to Mr. Beefy’s (It’s a bar, not a strip club. Get your minds out of the gutter) after the main event with a friend who is doing exactly what she always wanted to do, runs a funeral home with her husband, has the house, the kids, and the mortgage, but still manages to make me laugh until I cry.

So that’s probably enough.

posted by Elizabeth @ 12:32 AM