Bang! Pow!

Trying to decide whether or not to go to my high school reunion. Also reading Stephen King's "On Writing," which is great. Laugh-out-loud funny, touching, very self-aware, and a breeze to read (surprise, surprise). That's where I found this headline. He uses it when affectionately mocking his teenage self.

Speaking of teenage selves, please join me as I dwell obsessively on the reunion thing for a moment.

High school reunion. Looming. Soon. Why can I not pull the trigger and click on the buttons to buy the tickets that will get me there? Whence this endless hesitation? True, I have no interest in seeing any of the 18-year-old jocks and weenies and prepsters I graduated with, but hey -- they won't be there. The adults they turned into will, and those are the people I am both interested in and repelled by. It'd be so much easier if I lived in New York and could just swan up to the country on a lark, like my friends who -- yawn -- may or may not go and don't even have to decide yet.

But living way out here on the far coast requires a conscious, premeditated effort to involve myself in something that my own 18-year-old self would have dismissed with a sneer. No artifice of effortlessness possible. Lying to affect a disinterested air is even more pathetic and transparent than genuine interest, which at least has honesty on its side.

The list of 30 registered attendees is a catalog of people I have no desire to see again. Part of me thinks that anybody with an interesting life would find this event an uninteresting opportunity to dwell in the past. But I spent three years at a school known for its rich traditions and cast of characters, many of whom have gone on to fame, far more of whom have gone on to fortune. So many of my fellow alumni were to the manor born ... where have they landed?

And yet. Everyone I know who has overcome these same concerns has told me how great they found their own reunions.

I'll probably go, but for the same money I could spend a week in Rio.

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