I am now OFFICIALLY old!

Received a flyer in the mail this week for my 25-year High School reunion, which I have NO desire to attend.  I attended my ten-year reunion in ’92 and in spite of the free beer, it was so depressing that I said, "Never again!" and I’m sticking to that.  Most people romanticize so much about how their high school years were "the time of our lives" and all, but for the most part, I hated high school.  I look back on those three years now as kind of a void in my life, from which I’ve blotted out a lot of the memories over time—I have more vivid and happy memories of junior high than I do of high school.

What sucks about the Raytown school district is the boundary lines for the individual schools themselves.  I had attended school for ten years with more or less the same group of people through elementary and junior high and knew everyone pretty well, but when high school came along, we got split up because of the boundary lines for the high schools, so about a third of us attended Raytown South, and the other two-thirds went to Raytown High.  Thus, I was forced to deal with a whole group of new people in high school, which I found difficult because I wasn’t the most outgoing person in the world then.  To make matters worse, I was always a pretty good student prior to that, but my grades gradually got worse in high school, especially by the time I was a Senior because I was so burned-out on going to school altogether.  And then I turned right around and went to college right after graduating, but that’s another story…

High school was a fairly miserable period for me personally, and that ten-year reunion only served to point out a shitload of missed opportunities for me in the socialization department, especially with the opposite sex.  I was never properly taught how, much less encouraged, to be open with people and socialize when I was growing up—no one in my immediate family is exactly a social animal—thus I didn’t make many new friends in high school, male or female, and I’m still paying for that even today.  Hell, I never even dated anyone until I was damn near 21 and that’s always haunted me, too.  No one to blame but myself, but I was just kinda invisible to everyone in high school, therefore I don’t look back very fondly on that time of my life.

Getting back to the reunion thing, I got a kick out of the list of the two dozen or so people that the organizers were unable to track down—most of them aren’t worth looking for anyway!  Did they check the local jails?  I imagine at least a couple of them are probably still working at Wal-Mart too.  Anyway, the irony of this whole thing is I’d probably enjoy attending my friend Tom’s 25-year reunion at Raytown High more than my own class reunion—I’d know more people at that one!  As for the South reunion, there’s only a handful of people I even care to see again (including a couple girls I lusted mightily after), and I don’t care to put myself through something so depressing again.

However, in conjunction with the reunion, they’re holding some sort of golf event just down the road from my house.  Maybe I’ll just take a cooler full of beer with me and do a Bill Murray and crash that little party and wreak a little havoc on the links instead!  FORE!!