When Ten Years Still Isn't Enough

I'm old!

My ten year high school reunion is coming up this summer, and this has me less-than-thrilled.

I won't sit here and tell you that high school was hell and I never want to go back, because that's not true. For me high school was, well, fine. I learned what I was supposed to; I was involved in track and field; I sang in the choir for four years, participated in color guard, joined a few clubs. I had good friends. I didn't get invited to the crazy parties because I wasn't, no matter how much I sometimes wanted to be, one of those girls.

By senior year, I was so ready for college, where I knew I'd bloom and find my niche, but I resolved at the beginning of my last year of high school to be more involved, and be who I was. When my friends didn't want to go to dances or dress up on spirit days, I made new friends who did and would. Senior year was better, but not the grand entrance into society that I had imagined.

I can say with absolute certainty that--thank God--my high school years were not the best years of my life. So while my high school experience doesn't exactly bring back warm fuzzies, it wasn't awful either.

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So here we are ten years later, and the class is planning a reunion via our class page on Facebook. Technology is a beautiful thing. Now, I wasn't sure that I wanted to go in the first place; even with my lack of all-out hatred for my high school experience, I wasn't sure if I felt like seeing a majority of my classmates so soon.

The planning started slowly. Where should it be held, everyone wondered? At some point a deposit was put down on a hotel in our hometown, and that's where the trouble started. Now some of my classmates are staging a coup and demanding that the venue be changed because our hometown is "lame", "the bars suck", and having a reunion at a hotel in downtown is "stupid."

The suggested alternative venue? An Indian casino nowhere close to where we went to school. Cabanas, pool party, free-flowing alcohol! Woo hoo! I enjoy a drunken schmooze fest as much as the next girl (I think I'm still hung-over from my bachelorette), but to me it just seems like a sad commentary on the priorities of my graduating class. "Screw the catching up on old times...you need to do a few more shots!!!"

And now I'm reminded of exactly why I didn't want to go in the first place: people who are looking at the reunion as a drunken high school pool party (part two!) still have a lot of growing up to do. So I think I'll wait another five or ten years before getting back together with my class, because all these years of absence definitely hasn't made my heart grow fonder....