High School Reunion

Facebook has enabled a lot of different things, like keeping in touch with friends, stalking old flames, trash talking family, annoying people with your status and passively aggressively handling random friend requests, but I think the thing that is most fascinating and horrifying at the same time is the way it makes the whole high school reunion thing so much more accessible and easy to plan.

Seriously, what is the point of having a reunion now that we have Facebook? I’ve already seen whether so-and-so is married or has kids and have rated both spouse and kids on my adorability scale.  I kind of know what they do for a living, but more importantly, I know what they do every single day – in excruciating detail — and I’m over it.  And YET – people are still planning the old-fashioned high school reunion – the ones where you have to go to some gym somewhere and try to look at least as good or better than you did 10 or 20 years before, while regaling people with all of the awesomeness your life has been since high school.  (Which, by the way, is easy for me since my high school experience and awesomeness were mutually exclusive.*)

Before Facebook, I always felt that nobody could pay me to go back for a high school reunion, because of these very solid reasons:

a) My class had about 800 people in it. I only knew the names of about 200 of them and I only remain in close contact with 2 of them, so the odds of me running into someone I’d be truly happy to see are approximately  2 in 800. No, I take that back. The 2 people I know would not be there, so its 0/800.  Not good odds.

b) There is nothing I abhor more than having forced, awkward conversations with strangers, which is exactly how I imagine a reunion going down.

c) In order to cope with a. and b., I would require a blood alcohol level of at least 0.10 upon walking in, but by then I would be in the state where I tell everybody exactly what I think of them. Which, sometimes works out great, but mostly doesn’t.

d) Upon leaving, I would probably blow a 0.12 or 0.14, meaning I would have blacked out around the first conversation I started and not have remembered a damn thing for the rest of the night, and would only wonder the next day how much of an ass I made of myself and to whom.  There would probably be pictures. And they would be on Facebook, and I would feel as awkward and lame as I did every damn day I was actually in high school.

e) I have no vendettas against anyone, so I can’t go hoping to tell them off and flash some bling and tell them how great my life is and hope theirs sucks. I honestly don’t really care about what happened to people — not in a mean way — I hope they have good lives, but it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to me either way. And I’m pretty sure the feeling is mutual.

f) Okay, fine. If I were Oprah, I would totally go. But only if I got to fly in on my helicopter. And my dogs were invited. Then I would go. But see, I’m not Oprah. So…

So I hope I’ve made a pretty good case for why I just blew off my 15 year reunion last month.  Some kid in our class decided to plan one, via Facebook,  at a park that was supposed to be kind of informal.  Show up at a park anywhere from noon to seven. Bring your own food and beer.  No guidance on whether to bring kids/spouses, etc.  Just show up.  The little Facebook invitation let me reply that “maybe” I would go. I live nearby, so going wouldn’t have required traveling or reservations or even directions.  But I have principles. And for the reasons stated above, I would never go to a reunion, the same way I will never get bangs again.

BUT, Facebook has mellowed me a little bit. People were a lot scarier and meaner at 15 than they seem to be today. And if I’m being honest, I did briefly think about breaking my rule and I did suggest to one of my two high school friends that we might want to go.  She was very non-committal. Then I think she said she had to go the Farmer’s Market or some lame excuse that day – which I can understand. So I took that as a “no” for me going with someone to the reunion, which meant if I went,  it would be just me, by myself. It wasn’t looking good for the reunion.

But there was a part of me that tried to psyche myself up for the thing:  “if you do this, then you’re showing you have matured since high school.  We’re all supposed to be adults now. I’m sure there are plenty of fake nice people you forgot about for a good reason who will be very pleasant to have an awkward, unnecessarily long conversation with. You could talk about your family nobody cares about except you, or your job you hate, or your blog you haven’t told anyone about, or how much you hated the good old days of high school.” That wasn’t very effective, so I tried a different tack with myself: “Look, just finish off a half bottle of wine beforehand. That’ll take you what? Six minutes? How bad would it be?” To which my mind replied to itself, “HOW BAD COULD IT BE?! It could be a fucking nightmare! Are you kidding me? What if I show up and I know absolutely nobody? And nobody knows me?” To that, my optimistic side said, “If that happens, you could just pretend you’re just a random person holding a half-drunk bottle of wine in a paper bag that happened to be in the park and then call BD to turn the car around and come pick you up. No damage done.”  The retort: “Hmm. No. Fuck no.”

So I didn’t go. Because I have PRINCIPLES and I made an important promise to myself at my high school graduation that I would never forget what a bad idea it would be to come to a reunion one day.  And I kept that promise to myself , which I guess just shows the depth of my character and strength of my willpower.  I proved that I learned my lesson the time I broke the 1990 rule about never getting bangs again. I was able to remember back to the pain and suffering of Bad Decision 2003:  “Agreeing with Hairdresser that Bangs Might Look Cool.” I paid dearly for that one. Dearly.  So at the end of the day, I had integrity. I was totally not a pussy for not going. I’M NOT. I mean, I wasn’t!! Really.

And anyway, I think it must have turned out incredibly lame because not a single high school Facebook friend posted a status or pictures from this great reunion, so I’m assuming they are all pussies exactly like me and didn’t go, or they did go and then had their spouse or their mom that they still live with pick them up 5 minutes later, or they went and they didn’t really feel like posting a status about going to a high school reunion that sucked balls. That is what I tell myself. I guess I can put this all behind me, until some asshole on Facebook decides to plan a 16 year reunion. Which will be awesome.

* I have decided to unearth my highschool journals so that I may retell some of my story in future posts. I have no doubt they will cause many to pee their pants and/or snort at the sort of shit that I got myself into.  Sometimes even I forget why I hated high school, but I’m sure I will find very compelling arguments in those pages. Just have to tear apart the house first…

My Republican Facebook friends are killing me slowly and painfully, something they learned from Cheney, no doubt

I like to believe I’m open-minded and everybody has valid points and everybody is entitled to their own opinions and whatever, whatever, but I’ve decided that all of my Facebook “friends” who are super conservative staunch Republicans and want me everyone to fucking know it are annoying assholes.  I have seriously considered de-friending all of my bitchy war-mongering, liar-protecting, poor people-hating, dumb ass arch conservative friends because they, and their Facebook statuses, bring me down.  I can’t help but feel intellectually and morally superior to anybody who voted for Bush/Cheney twice and then voted for Sarah fucking Palin and isn’t even embarrassed about it.  Okay, so maybe I’m not very open minded. No. I’m not. And I hope before I defriend them, they defriend me because I feel dirty being linked to them, even if its only electronically, but they delight in torturing me, so I doubt they will take the high ground.

Now, I’ll admit they probably hate me too because I am a Facebook friend who people think is a Democrat and wants everyone to know it, but really I just like to have very dirty dreams about the President. All that hope and change talk gets me all hot and bothered and I just can’t help but lust after him. I so want to be his Monica Lewinsky — well, not the cigar part — but definitely the blue dress part, right after he reads me the Gettysburg address, and as we listen to “Yes We Can” .  I want to have his love child like Rielle had John Edward’s. Except of course, I love him because he isn’t an asshole like Bill Clinton and John Edwards, so the blue dress concept/love child might go right over his head.  Come to think of it, I picked the fucking worst Democrat to fall in lust with. I don’t think our mutual love is ever to be. A lot like my relationship with Oprah. Suffice to say we have a very complicated love triangle on our hands, but I think I’m the only one that is very bothered by it all.

But anyway, about my own political views — I’m not sure if I’m a Democrat and I honestly don’t hate everything Republican. I just think health care should be considered a basic human right in the richest country in the world, and I feel like having a bunch of poor, uneducated people in this country makes us worse off, so I’m all for educating them so they don’t have to be poor,  but that is all really secondary to my very dirty love of Barack Obama. I don’t know if that makes me a Democrat or a bleeding heart liberal or a perv, or just a homewrecker.  Maybe all of those things as well as being extremely annoying to my Republican frenemies.

So I’ll put some dumb innocuous status up like, “I wish Obama would give us a three day weekend every month” and then I get responses from people writing, “He’s already given lots of people 7 day weekends. Those kind of weekends i can do without. 😦 ” It is all I can do not to comment back, “Fuck you, fuck face! And don’t ever sully my Facebook status in this awful way this again!”, because I’m trying to use my words,  but I’d rather use a waterboard, which I know they would approve of  because Cheney told them it was okay, so long as somehow he was making money off it.

At times like these, I envision a world where all of the people who think people without money don’t deserve health care, and poor kids don’t deserve an education, and fear is a good excuse for war, and that free markets can solve every problem, and that women who do not want to have a child should bring them into the world anyway even though they won’t give her a job, a dime, childcare assistance or any help once that happens, and that God only loves Christians and white people, and that they can add their crazy uber conservative rhetoric to my Facebook statuses would all move into Texas together and then secede from the Union and wave their confederate flags around and talk about how great their state is and friend each other on Facebook and defriend me and leave the rest us the fuck alone.  The only problem with that plan unfortunately is that I don’t think they’d all fit in Texas. So I’ll throw in Lousiana too. Sorry Lousianans. And we’d have to split up Facebook too.  I wish them all luck. They aren’t bad people. They just have painfully bad ideas. I think. And I should know, because I have a lot of them myself.  Like the one I just wrote about.

But I will ask a higher power (Oprah herself) to give me the compassion I need for my extremely conservative Republican Facebook friends, but I swear to GOD, if they post any more comments on my statuses that in any way insult the Man I Will Wear A Blue Dress For, I’m going to lose my shit. And lose them too. As Facebook friends, forever.  Then who will they have to torture?

So now I’m ADD. What was I talking about again?

The Internet has me convinced that I’m ADD, and since this is a serious problem that affects millions of Americans, I want to use this popular blog as a platform to diagnose others.  You probably have ADD too, or cancer. Probably cancer.  It happens to the best of us.  But I started trying to figure out if I was ADD because I totally get distracted easily, especially when I’m on the phone making dinner and my kids are fighting and small kitchen fires are popping up everywhere.  So I found this list of symptoms (that I’ve conveniently cut and pasted below) out there so that we can take this test together and we can see who is more ADD -me or you. I bet me in most cases, because if you’re more ADD than me, no WAY you get through this list without checking Facebook.

Here it is:  Do you:

• get distracted easily?    I THINK I ALSO HAVE AN INTERNET ADDICTION.

• have difficulty concentrating on one thing at a time?     YEP, ESPECIALLY DURING SEX.

• tend to be disorganized?     WHERE THE FUCK IS MY MOUSE?

• have a hard time focusing or paying attention during conversations, listening to others, or while reading?   I SO LACK FOCUS DURING CONVERSATIONS WHEN I’M NOT THE ONE TALKING.

• often forget things like appointments or obligations? YEAH, NOW THAT I THINK OF IT, WHENEVER MY FRIENDS MOVE AND LAMELY OFFER PIZZA AS SOME SORT OF PAYMENT I ALWAYS FORGET I SAID I’D HELP.

• have trouble following directions that have multiple steps?   I DON’T KNOW. WHENEVER I COME ACROSS DIRECTIONS , I THROW THEM AWAY AND MAKE UP MY OWN.  WHO HAS TIME TO READ WHEN YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING SOMETHING INVOLVING MULTIPLE STEPS?
  

• have difficulty starting and finishing projects? YES. BUT I HAVE SUCH EASE IN THE MIDDLE OF THEM.

• tend to procrastinate?   AT TAX TIME ESPECIALLY.

• have trouble prioritizing information?   NOT WHEN ITS ABOUT ME.

• get impatient easily? WHEN MY KIDS TRY TO TELL ME STORIES ABOUT THEIR DAY, IF IT DOESN’T INVOLVE ME I ASK THEM TO NET IT OUT FOR ME.  I’M READYING THEM FOR MANAGEMENT IN THE CORPORATE WORLD.

• often feel restless and antsy? ONLY WHEN I’M AT WORK, IN THE STIRRUPS AT THE OB-GYN, SOCIALIZING AT MY KID’S SCHOOL, OR WATCHING SCOOBY-DOO.

• lose track of time and have trouble with time management? YEP, ESPECIALLY DURING SEX.

• often misplace or have difficulty finding things at home or at work?    SERIOUSLY, WHERE THE FUCK IS MY MOUSE?

• act before thinking through consequences?     THIS WOULD EXPLAIN THE MAJORITY OF MY EX-BOYFRIENDS.
  

• speak or blurt out before thinking about the impact your words will have on others?    OH YEAH, LIKE WHEN I TELL PEOPLE WHO ARE GETTING TESTS AT THE HOSPITAL THAT THEY PROBABLY HAVE CANCER.  THAT PROBABLY COUNTS.
  

• tend to have lots of racing thoughts?    I SERIOUSLY HATE NASCAR. AND TRACK TOO. NO.

• get bored easily?    DO THESE QUESTIONS EVER FUCKING END?

• tend to make careless mistakes when you have to work on a tedious or difficult project?   IF BY ‘MISTAKES’ THEY MEAN “CUT YOURSELF” THEN YES.

• take risks frequently?   WHY DO ALL THESE QUESTIONS CENTER AROUND MY SEX LIFE?

If you answered “yes” to the majority of these questions and the behaviors are severe enough that they interfere with your daily activities, it is possible that you have ADD. An accurate diagnosis can only be made by a trained professional. Depression, bipolar disorder, substance addictions, anxiety, phobias – all may share some similar symptoms to ADD, so it is important that your doctor rule out other conditions that require different treatment.

I don’t know about you, but I think Anna Paquin and Renee Zellweger are fugly, and that really bothers me, because the whole point of being an actress is to be hot. Unless you’re Meryl Streep. I don’t know what her point is. She is just masochistic. She gets nominated for Academy Awards just for showing up on set,  but then she never wins because people vote for someone hotter in the end.  Anne Hathaway is so much hotter than Meryl, thats all there is to it.  If I were a betting woman, Renee Zellweger could only win an Oscar when all the other chicks in the category were uglier, but that scenario seems statistically impossible.  And its good I’m not a betting woman, because I think she won one.  Pity votes. Or maybe some sexual favors were involved.  Probably a lot of both.

I shouldn’t be so mean  – its just that I’m agitated and restless because I can’t find my fucking mouse. I’m having trouble finishing this thing.  I’ll come back after Facebook.