MetaChat is an informal place for MeFites to touch base and post, discuss and
chatter about topics that may not belong on MetaFilter. Questions? Check the FAQ. Please note: This is important.
24 April 2009
I really really did not want to go to my ten year high school reunion ...→[More:]...so I hired a stripper to go, as me, instead. Really.
My 10-year is this summer, but I haven't heard anything other than a date. It's sure to be laid-back and small anyway: there were only 120 in the class. I'll be in town anyway, so we might as well have a bonfire on the beach. Just like old times.
But at her 20th people will wonder why she's awkward again. Or they'll figure she was having a manic episode.
I don't know if anyone has ever successfully made a transition from Doc Martens to platform stilettos? That seemed clearly implausible.
That high school is on the other side of L.A. from mine and she's two years older than me. Weird. If I were her I'd have skipped the camera crew, taken the stripper for drinks at 7969 and called it a day. Or date.
My 10 year reunion was pretty big for me. I walked into that room and was reminded that people used to like me, that I used to have friends, that I used to have fun, and now...what the fuck happened to me? It set off a major early-mid-life crisis, in a good way, that led me to a much happier place.
The 20 year was fun, too. My 7-years-younger (new) wife went with me. She describes herself as "ethnically androgynous," and, man, there wasn't any of that stuff in my Charlotte, NC, highschool. She pretended that she was the exchange student that no one remembered. Then we, like, totally hooked up.
Yeah, this just reads as kind of pathetic. High school still bothers her; she paid good money to make this statement; and her classmates saw through it. Way to extend the embarrassing factors of high school out into the rest of your adult life. It's one thing to be the doofy teenager, quite another to be the doofy twentysomething to pay someone else who basically looks exactly like you to pretend to be you at reunion, and talk to them on a hidden mike throughout and feed them lines, because that's how much you....don't care?
On a similar-but-different note: About 8 years after my high school graduation, when I was in my mid-20s, I worked at an Irish pub with a bunch of other young women my age. We generally had a great, fun, sometimes wild time hanging out and going out and suchlike. One of them had a younger brother in his senior year of high school - an intelligent, nerdy, fun, articulate kid who could not quite bring himself to ask out any of the girls in his class, who he categorised as either too dumb or too out of his league.
We cooked up a great scheme for him whereby three of us would go together with him to his prom. We'd get a limo, and he'd arrive at the high school prom, flanked by three women done up to our maximum ability in makeup, heels, and sheath dresses. We'd make a fuss over him all night and go everywhere arm-in-arm with him, in multiples, in sort of a real-life light-metal video style.
We were totally all for it, but he was too shy to go for it.
I think what bothers me most about it is the fact that she decided to fuck up a big party that a bunch of people were probably really looking forward to because she had a lousy time in high school ten years ago. How far up your own ass do you have to be to think that not one person from your class could possibly have changed for the better over the course of a decade?
Also, news flash: most people hated high school. Get over it.
Some people find this funny, and some don't, apparently. It's funny to me because in high school, more than once I thought I was going to be killed by some of my classmates. Because I spent four years in an environment that taught me to hate people like myself; because I had to watch everybody else reach sexual maturity while I had to hide my own sexuality; because I had to spend four years in what amounted to redneck training school just so that I could get a diploma that would let me go to college.
So what, this woman fucked up a party that a bunch of people were looking forward to. It's probably because she hates them, and unlike most of us, she got to at least piss them off for what they did to her. Good for her.
The only thing she could really say about why she hated high school is because "everybody" drove a BMW- the car envy scenes just went on and on and on. If there was more, we didn't get to hear it (did we? I glazed over during the car scences). I would be incredibly surprised if she had some personal grudge against every single person she went to high school with who was going to attend that event. To paint everybody she knew 10 years ago with such a broad brush seems childish. Maybe they were jerks 10 years ago, but she's the only one acting like a jerk now.
BP I hated high school and have never had contact with anyone from high school since I left. Still, I left that all behind. My life is just to short to keep letting the hurt follow me. She may of had her fun but I really think if she feels this strongly about something 10 years in the past she is now hurting herself. She needs to let it go and just live her life.
arse_hat, did three of your classmates ever corner you and show you a switchblade? And tell you they could kill you before anybody would know it?
As an adult, I know they were full of shit, but at 14 I thought I was going to die. If I could piss those guys off now by sending a stripper to their reunion party, I'd do it. I've gone on and lived my life, but I guess I haven't "let go" because it still pisses me the fuck off.
If I could piss those guys off now by sending a stripper to their reunion party, I'd do it.
They'd probably be like the guy having fun in the trailer who told the stripper, you're not Andrea, but I like you better. I would think there would be a large number of people who'd probably enjoy having a stripper at their high school reunion. There has to be better revenge. A plague of locusts?
I'm firmly in your camp, BP. I was the class psycho (phone lines tied up for hours before call waiting--a boy who worked at the synagogue office found the number , "I just be playing with you", apple spit on my locker, kids running up to kick me, being asked to sign a yearbook and then snatching it away, calling someone I thought was a friend and hearing a friend of hers telling her boyfriend "ask who it is and then hang up", hearing plans to a party to which I wasn't invited being discussed in front of me ....and had my face rubbed in it by being voted most unusual. Someone asked me if I was offended....no: hurt.My class hasn't held any reunions (only 60 kids; it was the third year the magnet had a class of seniors). I don't know what I'll do if one ever is.
Back in highschool I daydreamed that on the reunion I'd be showing up fashionably late, in a designer dress ooozing succcess and hawtness, but ten years later I really couldn't give a toss. I don't even think about former highschool people unless I have kept in touch (two people). I don't even recognize their names if they show up in the paper but my mother does and throws herself on the phone to report what X or Y is doing for a living these days. The only time I recognized anyone from school in a magazine/paper it was a gradeschool mate who was being interviewed about life as a blind mother of seeing babies. She looks more or less exactly the same (but adult of course) and I was really happy for her as she looked quite happy as a homemaker to two adorable kids. (The interview was mainly about the fact that the state wanted her to have help caring for the babies but they didn't realize they were talking to a blind girl who biked to school, there's no stopping her.)
Oh, and a funny note - her house was mainly in blue - she told me in fourth grade that was her favorite color which boggled my mind as she couldn't see any colors. I guess it still is her fave color!
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
