Monday…the day after I didn’t watch the Oscars. It was either the red carpet being streamed live at 230AM or me, sleeping on my blue sheets? I went for the blue sheets and would like to thank the academy for creating a show that fueled a fabulous twitter stream that I dove into with my morning coffee…at 6AM.

I digress. It’s Monday and so Stasha says, make a list! Our prompt this week comes from Rachel, at Totally Ovar It. Any woman who can write about going menopostal is a woman after my own heart, and she wants to know our top ten pros/cons for going to our class reunion.

The last time I went to a class reunion was a long-ass time ago and some things happened there that were waaay too similar to things that happened in high school. There may or may not have been inappropriate necking (no, I was not at the time married and neither was the person with whom I may or may not have been making out), there was certainly a lot of drinking, and there were other things that are a tad blurry around the edges.

This reunion will be THIRTY.  That makes me wonder how it is that I can’t remember the name of the movie I really liked last year with that one actor, you know the one from that show, with that girl? But thirty-some years later, I can tell you exactly who sat in front of me in third-year Latin and the name of the girl who shoved me in the lunch room on the first day of school my freshman year.

High school was, for me, a pretty standard litany of midwestern misery and woe. I spent two years wanting to be “in” with the kids I thought were cool and once I found myself on the periphery of that “cool” crowd, I spent the next two years wondering how the hell I was going to escape. College couldn’t come fast enough, as far as I was concerned.

So going back to a reunion? Hmm. I’ve actually been thinking about it, because it’s entirely likely that we will be in the States this summer, so theoretically, it’s possible. Theoretically.  Or maybe I should schedule a root canal instead.

I should go to the reunion, for reasons both profound and shallow:

1. Aren’t you curious about what happened to all those people?

2. Wouldn’t it be nice to see that the people you were jealous of in high school maybe haven’t amounted to much?

3. Isn’t it time to put the ghosts of high school to rest, for god’s sake?

4. You have better hair now than you did then.

5. You’d finally have the guts to tell the kids who make racist, sexist, homophobic jokes to shut the fuck up, which you never could bring yourself to do in high school.

 

I should stay the hell away from the reunion, for reasons both profound and shallow:

1. I had a better body in high school than I did now.

2. There are way too many people from my high school who make jokes on FB about hating Obama, with “reasons” funneled directly from Fox News.

3. I was mostly miserable around these people in high school, so why go back?

4.  The ghosts of high school make gorgeous fodder for novels, so don’t lay those ghosts to rest, use them!

5. The people I really cared about from high school (approximately 2.7 people) probably won’t go, so I’d end up standing by the punchbowl wishing I were anywhere but here. Which is how I spent most of high school.

 

I’d say the balance seems pretty firmly to tip in the direction of stay the hell away.  I think instead, I’ll just go visit my mom and we can cackle together over my senior yearbook.  Maybe I’ll feather my hair for the occasion.