Some people I haven’t seen for a while. But we’d never connect as regular friends.
HS FB people expect me to.
Cons:
Its $150 that I’d rather not spend right now
At least one person there will want to cause trouble/drama.
A few militant tea-party shills will want to try to brow-beat their politics
Weekend of my son’s 9th birthday; only 9 once.
HS FB people will disappear. (is this in the wrong column?)
I have “I don’t want to do this” cold feet. I don’t want to dredge up the past. I don’t want to re-live mistakes I made decades ago. “Yup, thats the party I got drunk alright”. I don’t want to have to stand there & smile while my lack of success, personal choices, or politics are mentioned. I don’t want to stare at my shoes or pretend to ‘Ooooh/Aaaaah’ that women that can still afford to pay $5k for high-heels with red soles or that man can drive Italian sports cars while I’m wearing a MensWarehouse suit and applying to CareerBuilder daily.
I don’t want to hear about the new boat, the summer/second house, this years Mercedes, the golf games, or various rotating VP positions of who works where. There are days when I think the absolute smartest people are the ones on ‘The List’ that gets circulated that ‘no one can get in touch with’.
(Run, you magnificent bastards! Save Yourselves…!) I’m not so mean as to go the Lara Flynn Boyle route, but I can see the temptation.
I’m about one conversation away from a ‘with regrets’. But thats my story; tell me about yours. Did you go? Why/why not? Did you ever regret your decision?
I went to the 5 year and 25 year reunions. It was fun, but not earth shatteringly so. Skipped my 10 and 20 years, also with no regrets.
With the advent of FB, I actually feel less compelled to attend these reunions because I’ve already quasi-connected with the people who are important to me. I don’t really care about the others, nor do they care about me.
So my advice is to quit agonizing about it. Either commit to going and having a good time, or bail. Remember that if you miss it, there will be one in another 5 or 10 years.
I’d also advise everyone to leave his/her spouse at home, unless they love socializing with strangers or will know one or two other people. My husband insists that I attend his reunions and it’s always the same routine: He gets all tanked up seeing his old friends, while I engage in strained conversations with strangers. I gave him the option to stay home and he opted to come. But I wouldn’t force it.
It certainly doesn’t sound to me like you want to go.
I attended one of mine - the 10th. Fewer than a quarter of the class showed up. The music was way too loud (probably because it was held in an armory :eek: ) the food was mediocre, and the people I was really interested in seeing weren’t there. I never went to another, partly because I never heard about any others but mostly because high school wasn’t that big a thing in my life. It was just a stepping stone to what my life has become. I doubt I’ll ever attend another.
I came in to say that I’m going to skip my 5th this year, until I realized that it probably already happened. I may have missed it accidentally, rather than intentionally. Still, everyone from my class in high school who I actually want to be in contact with, I still am. Why go see the fools I never liked even then?
Eh, I’m going to my 30th in a couple weeks. I’m not wild to go, but I enjoy seeing people I haven’t seen in a while, and it’s a good excuses to go back to the small town where I grew up. No family lives there any more, so I rarely get a chance to get back there.
I have reconnected with them on Facebook, to organize the thing, and actually I have very little in common with most of them. But I’m curious about what kind of people they have become, and I’m always up for fun. My poor husband, though; he’ll be sitting there with nothing to do all night, the introvert. I’ll probably recommend he bring the iPad.
We just sent invitations to the 35th and I’m sure everyone is saying “Sandra Battye? Who’s that? She was in our class?” I got roped into it by a friend. Actually, it isn’t that onerous or time consuming.
If I wasn’t on the committee, I wouldn’t go. Like everyone else said, I already see the people I want to. But the possibility remains that I will reconnect with someone.
Don’t go if you don’t want to or it’s too expensive. ($150! Ours costs $40 for an afternoon of appetizers and wine at the old high school. Anyone can continue the party on their own.) Only one “friend” remembers any detail from that time, the rest of us draw a merciful veil on youthful indiscretions.
PITA. People who ignored you back then will ignore you now. Old friends aren’t still friends. People will promise to stay in touch and exchange emails: you’ll never hear from them again. I only went to one (my 40th), and it was basically a big waste of time.
The next one would be my 45th! :eek: (I graduated in 1968).
D and I actually hosted our very first (5 year) reunion in our apartment, and most everyone slept over. That was kinda fun, although there were some middle of the night shenanigans with people who weren’t SO’s of each other;).
I helped organize the 20th year one, and haven’t been to one since then.
For the 40th, 4 couples went on a cruise, and didn’t bother to contact anyone else. Villa Rica High School has an alumni home page, and I’m in there several times asking about the reunion, but heard nothing.
So the 45th is coming up in 2 years, but unless a lot of progress is made with my dementia, I don’t think we’ll go, since I wouldn’t want to see anyone being in that condition.
But if it were otherwise, and I weren’t sick, I think we’d go, if only to see who’s still alive (a little gallows humor, there:)), since we were such a small graduating class - 65, I think.
I went to my 15 year recently, entirely for shits and giggles. Fact is, everyone I cared to know from high school I never lost touch with. I went to the reunion just to toy with all the other people for my own amusement. Everyone I spoke to I told a wildly different story. I got married, divorced, never found anyone, worked as a motivational speaker, a professional body-painter, an underwear model, a gay porn star, I was the leader of a doomsday cult in North Dakota, I invented OxiClean, and on and on. I had an AMAZING time.
The only reason I went either time was in the hope of seeing certain people again, and none of them showed up. So I was just bored. For the 40th I had to travel, so I was both bored and out of pocket quite a bit.
I don’t do facebook, but maybe I should, I would probably stand a better chance of connecting with those folks that way.
Roddy
I went to my 10th just to see which cheerleaders had gotten fat and which football players had gotten bald. I didn’t like most of those people when I was there. I’m not likely to spend money to see them now.
I just went to my 20th. I had an unexpectedly wonderful time. I was pretty neutral about the whole thing, and mainly wanted to see an old and close friend who lives at the other end of CA from me. But it was great!
Everyone was very relaxed and nice, and it was pleasant to see that we’d mostly grown up into nice people. I was thrilled to see an old buddy unexpectedly. My ex-boyfriend was there (and is an Alex Jones follower, truther, right-wing gun-nut! :eek: Also lives in SF and is a technogeek, less surprisingly.) and it was nice to see him. I just felt very comfortable with several people in a way that I don’t usually feel, and I think we all had the attitude that impressing anyone would be pointless and here I am, you can take or leave it.
In a way it was also really healing (?) I guess would be the word. I could see that a lot of the ickiness that had existed was just because we were all awkward and having a hard time. One guy who I remembered as just a really unpleasant kid who was always rude to me turned out to be a great dude, and we hit it off. His attitude had nothing to do with me, and probably everything to do with growing up gay in a small town with a rotten stepdad. No one in my hometown came out until college if they wanted to survive.
I’m very very glad I went. Had a great time. Don’t go if you don’t want to.
I didn’t go to my 10th and I’m kind of sorry I missed it.
I didn’t go because I thought everyone I wanted to see wasn’t going to be there. But then everyone I wanted to see ended up going. And then a week later I run into a few people from my class and they couldn’t believe I didn’t go and they told me I was missed.
But honestly, until this thread I hadn’t thought about being sorry I missed it since that day. So even if you do miss it and regret it, it’s not really a big deal.
Speaking of awkward, these are the same guys with whom I went to elementary school when we first got here from Germany, and who used to gang up on me after school because I spoke and acted differently from them.
In those days, I had to walk home from school after midget football practice because the school bus had long gone, and there they’d be, 3 or 4 of them, pushing me from one to the other until I finally got in the first punch and then it was all she wrote for the “German Boy” (also known as “Adolf”).
All that changed, though, when I got into high school and in the 9th grade grew out my hair and started playing drums in my rock band. Then I became “Beatle Bill” and had no more trouble whatsoever. With them or the girls.
So what do you think? Did I forgive them?
No. I have not. They probably passed that shit on to their kids and their kids to the grandkids.
I’m busily ignoring the emails about my 20th reunion now. High School was a pretty miserable time for me, and I don’t care to rehash anything about it. I have kept in touch with the one or two people who were not complete douchebags to me. I had little interest in keeping the others in my life.
So, I was a douchebag then too, and I changed. Maybe my classmates changed too, right? Sure. And in that case, I’d be in a room full of people who had changed over 20 years and are no longer the people I remember. In other words, strangers. So, for me at least, the best possible outcome is to wind up in a room full of people who are effectively strangers. Strangers who will here and there remind me of something I would just as soon forget.
I went to my 15 a couple of years ago, because I happened to be in town visiting family that weekend anyway, and I figured what the heck, why not. Very few of my classmates bothered, though, none of them the ones I hung out with. I might make an actual effort come 25, though, since that’ll probably be better attended.
High school was a blast and it was so much fun to reconnect with people I hadn’t seen (and in some cases hadn’t thought of) in years.
It’s fun to see what path people chose in their lives, and where people eventually ended up. Like an episode of “Whatever Happened To …”, only with people you really knew.
