High School Reunion

Last Friday I had an evening flight out of San Jose. I had just settled into my seat on the plane when a chunky girl in her late twenties sat down next to me. Her dress was made of some kind of reflective gold material that looked really uncomfortable even for an hourlong flight, and she had on the sort of makeup you don't usually see outside Cirque de Soleil. She looked like a hurriedly wrapped Christmas present.

She was obviously dressed to go out, and given the timing of the flight I figured she was meeting a guy.

"Going home?" I said.

"No, just visiting people. I'm actually from around here. You?"

"Nah, I'm from Orange County. Just going home for the weekend."

"What for?"

"I figured I'd visit my parents; they still like seeing me every once in a while. And I have this 5-year high school reunion thing."

"Oh yeah?" she said, smiling broadly. "You looking forward to it?"

"Not really; I sort of got talked into it. I don't really have a reason to go, you know?"

"Yeah, I feel ya. I actually met my boyfriend at my 10-year - I'm going down there to see him tonight."

"Oh. Did you guys go to high school together?"

"No, he was actually there with someone else. Funny story." At this point she launched into a long story about her cousins and Fresno State football that lasted until we were over San Luis Obispo. The whole time, I was thinking that she had probably looked much better at 18. With some fat girls, you can tell they've always been fat - they don't care as much, and they're used to wearing clothes that don't make it obvious. Others, like Gold Dress, had clearly been the hot girl at some point, back before they started spilling out the arm holes of their overmatched cocktail dresses. I wondered if her boyfriend had been around through the transformation. When you see someone every day, it's easy to lose sight of radical changes in their appearance, but when you take a five-year break and suddenly see them again, it's obvious - you can tell who put back forty beers a week in college, who grew out of her goth phase, who lived down the hall from the university fitness center. I smiled. Yeah, I was looking forward to the reunion.

For all the growing up that everyone supposedly does between 18 and 23, the vast majority of people still carry around more or less the same identity that they had in high school. As much as we'd like to believe that college makes us radically different and that we "find ourselves" when we can get away from our hometowns, really, it's usually the other way around - we carry the people we were in high school with us to college. Because of this, when you go home for a reunion, you don't just get to see old friends again, you get to jump back to whoever you were when you were 17. I enjoyed high school, and like most people who weren't miserable as teenagers, I had cleaned up the memories a little - forgotten about the early-morning lifts and runs with the baseball team and the four hours of homework a night, and replaced those images with football games and underage drinking on the golf course.

The other great thing about reunions is that you can socialize well with very little thought. Since you'll be repeating the same story about how you're doing 50 times, it's really easy to zone out and pick up on other things that you wouldn't notice if you were actually focusing on the conversation. This means you notice not just that someone's not really interested in talking to you, but also that they're checking out the ass of one of the girls you had English class with in 10th grade. It also makes it way easier to function while hellaciously drunk. Plus, you already have a template to shove people's life experiences into - the stoner, the girl who got hot, the incredibly successful nerd. Everyone seems to conform to the stereotypes. They almost have to, by definition; it's just a question of degree. Obviously you can qualify to be the faded loser by getting arrested for exposing yourself at Coachella, but you could also just do something as minor as dropping out of college - as long as nobody's done anything worse.

So when I showed up, I at least had a framework to work in, but I still didn't really know what to expect. The reunion itself was at Dave & Buster's in Irvine Spectrum. A couple of friends were having a hotel party beforehand, and within fifteen minutes of showing up I was starting to get a good buzz. Right before we left, there was a knock at the door and some guy whose name I'd forgotten came in. He was wearing a t-shirt that was covered in refried beans. Suddenly I didn't feel so bad that I'd worn basketball shorts to a semi-formal event. "Jesus man, you alright?" someone asked.

"Nah, I'm fine; this is only my second beer," he said, holding up the burrito.

Things went downhill from there. We all piled into a shuttle to the other side of the Spectrum (why is there a shuttle going from the Doubletree to D&B's on a Saturday at 7 PM?), and I got my nametag and walked straight to the bar. Within twenty seconds a girl from my junior year physics class came up to me. She had been one of the cheerleaders in high school, and she was still gorgeous. "Hey, I heard you were working on a book!"

One of my favorite parts about coming back home is hearing rumors about myself. For some reason I think adults - and particularly my parents' friends and friends' parents - are even worse than kids about spreading unconfirmed facts, so every time I come back down south I get to hear something new. To date, I've heard that I was getting married (to two different girls), that I was going to Harvard Law, that I was a vocal atheist, and that I'd already written a novel (like I have that kind of commitment). I actually remember being introduced somewhere once as "the kid who got 100% on the Santa Margarita entrance exam" when I was like 21, which is not only untrue, but is also a good competitor for "Least Impressive Introductory Fact Ever." I think I would be more proud if people introduced me as "Hey, this is Dan - one time when he was twelve he kicked a shoe all the way from the base of his driveway into the shoe closet AND IT LANDED RIGHT SIDE UP NEXT TO THE MATCHING SHOE."

I laughed. "No; I wish. How are you doing?"

"Great, great!"

"Are you still living around here, or somewhere else? Weren't you up in LA?"

"Well, I just finished up with school, but I'm looking at jobs in New York now - I really think I want to move out there."

"Oh yeah? What do you want to do?"

"You know, marketing, design, whatever I can get - I know some people out there, so I'm hoping I can find something pretty soon. Where are you?"

"Actually, I live up in the Bay Area now."

"Oh, nice!" She smiled, for real. Even in high school she had mastered the art of The Look - responding to something a guy says and meeting his gaze in that perfect, innocent way that says 'I honestly care about what you're saying and I swear I have no idea that you're imagining dotting my eyes* right now.' Girls, if you learn how to do this in bars, you will never have to buy a drink again. "How do you like it?"

"Eh, it's okay - definitely different from here, that's for sure."

"Different how?" I didn't have an answer prepared.

"I dunno, it's just... less hot girls, a lot of dudes. Work." I couldn't think of anything. Shit. I sounded dumb.

"Yeah, I understand. Well, it can be tough."

"Yeah, it sucks. Don't ever get a real job, seriously," I said, deadpan. She laughed.

Whenever you talk to old friends there's some threshold that they hover around where you have to decide how much to tell them about what's really going on with your life. The base level is typical: where you work, how you like your job ("it's cool"), how you like the city you're living in. Then there's the second level, where you reveal that your work is repetitive and boring, just like everyone else's, and that you still aren't really sure what you want to do with your life. The third level is finally approaching honesty: you can let them know that you're happy to see a couple of people, but mostly to evaluate how the rest are doing with their lives. (Hopefully, worse than you.) The fourth level, rarely achieved while sober, involves telling the other person that you'd rather drive home to jerk off in the shower than spend another thirty seconds talking to them.

Really, you're just looking for the mask to drop. You want that first glimpse of honesty from them as badly as they want it from you. It's not really the fear that your accomplishments pale next to anyone else's - it's that you have a nagging feeling that everyone's story is the same, and you just want someone else to confirm it. On the outside it looks like the typical vodka-fueled pissing contest that you'd see at any party, but really it's the opposite. You're just hoping that the other person is as miserable and directionless as you.

When I gave a speech at my high school graduation (OK, stop laughing) the first thing I said was something like "Congratulations on graduating. Welcome to the top 95% of the American population." The speech was mostly about how easy it is to get complacent, especially for rich kids from a private Catholic high school who had always had everything given to them. Twenty-three is a weird year for most of those kids, because they're starting to see the peak of the roller coaster. There's no longer an attractive, constantly available pool of the opposite sex around (see: Loyola Marymount and Santa Clara) and the parental teat is finally starting to run dry.

Most people I talked to before going home said having a five-year reunion was weird, but really it was perfectly timed - it's the absolute pinnacle for most kids from Orange County. We've just finished up with college and gotten jobs that are still interesting just because they're jobs. The drudgery of work is still outweighed by the cool new stuff you can buy to furnish your apartment - which is WAY nicer than the one you had in school! For most of us, our lives have been so ludicrously plush that only a spectacular failure or success will do them justice. Nothing else merits a good story. And for those of us who are merely comfortable, it's not going to be enough. If you grew up in a five-bedroom mansion in Coto de Caza, even a nice apartment and a 60K job right out of college is going to feel like dogshit, and the inevitable "...is this it?" moment is that much worse.

Part of me is a little glad I'm probably going to be out of a job in a couple of months. If anything, it'll force me back to that place where I was exactly five years ago - 18 and waiting to start the next big step, and just young and stupid enough to think that it'd all work out without me really making an effort to direct things myself. That's why I hate the expression "enjoy the journey." It implies that you can get something out of treating your life the same way you'd treat a four-hour road trip.

After many very similar conversations and an ill-advised 4 AM trip to Del Taco, I got home around 5. This didn't help the fact that I had to be up at 9 for church with my parents. Probably for that reason, when I finally got back to my apartment in Sunnyvale that night, I was exhausted. I collapsed into bed immediately, and when I woke up, still wearing the same shirt I'd had on all day Sunday, for a brief second I forgot I wasn't at home anymore. "Sweet," I thought. "I'll get a bowl of cereal and then take the dog for a walk, and the- FUCK!"

Then I went to work. Don't ever get a real job. Seriously.

*For those of you who don't know, dotting a girl's eyes=blowing one on her face. As in, "Every girl has had her eyes dotted at least once by age 25." Which is also true.