The More Things Change...
Two Saturdays ago, I attended my high school reunion celebrating twenty years since graduation. I initially had reservations about going at first, but I wanted to see my how my high school classmates evolved (and I to them) over the last twenty years; vain curiosity trumped everything else.
A little background first: I did not enjoy high school very much. I did not have the clichéd experience some people believe high school to be (on either end of the spectrum). My days in high school were dollops of “good”, heaping tablespoons of “bad”, all on top of a wide base of “meh”. With that in mind, I decided to leave most of my high school experiences (and the people involved) in the past and moved on. This worked for nineteen years until technology and web-based social networking rendered my efforts moot.
As for the reunion itself, it had a much smaller number of people I had expected. Out of four hundred or so people in our graduating class, about sixty people showed up for the festivities throughout the course of the evening (not including spouses). This small group of people though created a nice sample to make Nate Silver (fivethirtyeight.com) proud. The sixty classmates assembled formed a nice microcosm of my high school social structure (as I remember it). Initially, all of the people intermingled with one another. That’s to be expected when you meet people you haven’t seen in two decades in some cases. However once the hall’s staff served dinner, the static high school dynamics came into sharp detail; all of the people who ran in the same circles back in the day did so again over a buffet of mostaccioli, fried chicken, Italian beef, mashed potatoes, and salad.
I did enjoy the conversation that progressed throughout the evening: talking about teachers from high school, speculation of missing classmates scheduled to arrive (but failed to do so), local and national politics, and the like. Now the event has passed without me collapsing into a puddle of insecurity, I can finally accept and appreciate how much I have grown in the last twenty years. It also showed me that even though change can come to individuals, that change becomes more difficult when those individuals gather (especially if there is a shared history among the collected individuals).
A little background first: I did not enjoy high school very much. I did not have the clichéd experience some people believe high school to be (on either end of the spectrum). My days in high school were dollops of “good”, heaping tablespoons of “bad”, all on top of a wide base of “meh”. With that in mind, I decided to leave most of my high school experiences (and the people involved) in the past and moved on. This worked for nineteen years until technology and web-based social networking rendered my efforts moot.
As for the reunion itself, it had a much smaller number of people I had expected. Out of four hundred or so people in our graduating class, about sixty people showed up for the festivities throughout the course of the evening (not including spouses). This small group of people though created a nice sample to make Nate Silver (fivethirtyeight.com) proud. The sixty classmates assembled formed a nice microcosm of my high school social structure (as I remember it). Initially, all of the people intermingled with one another. That’s to be expected when you meet people you haven’t seen in two decades in some cases. However once the hall’s staff served dinner, the static high school dynamics came into sharp detail; all of the people who ran in the same circles back in the day did so again over a buffet of mostaccioli, fried chicken, Italian beef, mashed potatoes, and salad.
I did enjoy the conversation that progressed throughout the evening: talking about teachers from high school, speculation of missing classmates scheduled to arrive (but failed to do so), local and national politics, and the like. Now the event has passed without me collapsing into a puddle of insecurity, I can finally accept and appreciate how much I have grown in the last twenty years. It also showed me that even though change can come to individuals, that change becomes more difficult when those individuals gather (especially if there is a shared history among the collected individuals).
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