Just the other day, I got the invitation from my high school for my graduating class’s twentieth anniversary reunion, which is happening a month from now.  A month?  You’ve got to be kidding me.  I need much longer than that to prepare myself for that kind of trauma.  I laughed like a hyena as I crumpled up the invitation and threw it in the recycling bin.  I immediately posted a message on Twitter saying, “Got my high school reunion invitation today. Is there a polite way to say, ‘F Off, I Hated High School?’ “

The next day, I e-mailed one of my friends from back then who lives down in Newport (Oregon) now, and who tracked me down on MySpace last summer after seeing one of my gigs on TV.  I asked if he’ll be going to the reunion.  The short answer is that he will not be.  He mentioned a few people who he’d been in contact with lately, and who he wasn’t excited to see, and they were all names of people who had either bullied, ignored, or insulted me back in the day.  You see, in high school, I was a quiet, shy, kinda nerdy guy (I know, it’s hard to believe) and most people didn’t talk to me.  The ones who did talk to me usually did so in a mocking way.  The precious few who were my actual friends are some of the people I’m still in contact with today.  A handful of them I’m very close to.  There are about ten people I’d like to see, out of my graduating class of four hundred, but the rest I couldn’t care less about.  I’m not nostalgic for high school at all.  College had its moments, and its close friendships (some of which I still maintain), but I have to admit that I’m really enjoying life now much more than ever before.  Even with the extremely painful things that have happened recently, I feel alive now in a way that I never used to.  I was a shell of a person back then, and I feel like I had nothing to offer anyone.  If I were to go to a reunion now, it would just be too freakin’ weird, with people trying to talk to me as if we were friends, or trying to feign interest in my life in the interim.

Not to mention the fact that I don’t go by my middle name anymore, like I did back then, so I’d have to tell THAT story about four hundred times.  No thank you; I’ll pass.

I remember one person who I ran into when I still lived in Yakima and worked at the video store.  She walked in the door and instantly recognized me.  “Oh my gosh!  Hey [my middle name], how are you?”  She told me her name, which I recognized too.  She looked great, and had been a cheerleader all through high school, but she also played the flute, which is how I had known her.  We talked for a few minutes about the usual pleasantries, and then she said, “What’s your last name again?  I want to say [my last name], but you’d kill me.”  The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I replied, “Well it IS [my last name], and why would I want to kill you for that?”  She sputtered, “Uhhh . .ababah. . .I gotta go.  Good to see you!” waved over her shoulder, and ran out the door.  I just stood there, dumbstruck and fuming.

In other news, this trip down Memory Lane has got me thinking about someone completely different; my girlfriend from my college years.  She comes up in conversation every once in a while, and every time she does, the people who knew me then say things like, “You sure loved her a lot.”   And it’s true.  Ours was a complicated relationship that lasted for about five years, and we split up for good when I moved to Portland and she moved to Seattle.  We talked on the phone a few times after that, but then the trajectories of our lives took over, and we haven’t talked since.  She’s the one I’ve wondered about more than any other, and I’ve even looked her up occasionally online.  I’ve had the feeling that her life hasn’t gone in the way that she expected it would, and that she’s not happy about it.  What I’ve found recently is that she’s not married, she’s still living in the Seattle metropolitan area, she’s still singing both jazz and classical music, and she’s still working for a video game company.  She was doing all of those things the last time I talked to her.  I haven’t tried to e-mail her or contact her in any way.  I wouldn’t know where to begin, really, other than to say that I’ve thought about her a lot over the years, and that I really hope she’s well, and that I would love to talk to her sometime and see what she’s done with herself.

Man, life is weird, but I suppose I wouldn’t have it any other way.