#paxil

I went to the 10 year high school reunion neither willingly nor unwillingly. Somehow I had managed to carry with me--whole and unspoiled, a decade after separation from the place and the concomitant social experience--the same exact feeling of detached indifference. I went because my wife and I were in the same graduating class at the same school. The logic of me being her escort to the event outweighed any of the alternative dating options I considered proposing for her.

The 10-year for me was way back in 2002. I should have been somewhat nervous about it I guess considering the primary motivating factors for conversation at these things are nostalgia and/or schadenfreude. In high school I was on that social level of invisibility below even the geeks and the nerds, because they at least existed in a social space necessitating a label. It's hard to be nostalgic about that time we had French class together for three straight years and never spoke. So that was out as an option. And the schadenfreude, well, at the time I was still a housewife. Not that I was ashamed of it, it just requires very little explanation. When "So what are you doing now?" is followed with something like "forensic accounting," you have social permission to drone on endlessly afforded by the fact that nobody knows what the fuck you're talking about. That can kill a whole hour! But when you're a housefrau as I was, nobody doesn't know what that is. And nobody wants to hear the details of your job, 70% of which is another person's feces. They have parents. They know what you do. Being a dude in that role seems interesting, but it works out to about one extra sentence of conversation, usually something vaguely condescending. Proud as I was of my work at the time (no children died!), it made the schadenfreude part kind of difficult. Plus, even if I did fight off the social acrophobia long enough to look down on someone, the only person I would have had to share it with was my date/wife who had made me swear I'd be nice. The running list of who had gotten fat/gone bald I kept to myself. Which sucks because, I mean, what else is the point?

That was the 10. The 20 is coming up next year. I haven't yet gotten the invitation yet, but if anyone on the organizing committee is reading this: I'm not going. Ostensibly the draw is to catch up with people you haven't seen, but with Facebook, I'd be reunion-ing with people whose breakfast menu from that morning I could probably reliably produce for you. The people I would see in a hallway 20 years ago in an acne-fied, gangling mob of backpacks and elbows but had not then and still have never physically spoken to I could already give you their marital status, their jobs, what kinds of cars they drove and to where they drove them, the names and ages of all their kids and the positioning of most of their tattoos and/or piercings. A reunion now is a physical redundancy from a pre-digital world. The conversations will still start with "remember that time..." but we'll be talking about earlier that week.

Plus face-to-face social interaction requires a level of politeness that digitality does not. I think I would know more about a person if I followed their Twitter feed immediately after our conversation rather than from the conversation itself. I could make empty small-talk with a guy whose face I vaguely remember, end it with a handshake and the obligatory false promise to keep in touch, then go straight to my iPhone and see he tweeted: "20 mins talking to some tool about mortgage rates. I think maybe he was a janitor? Gay vibe. Party sux."

A friend of mine just went to her 30-year reunion and says she likes them more the more years pass. I'm going the opposite direction. My indifference at the first one is bleeding into overt hostility toward the upcoming one. It's a new order out there. Social media has smothered the idea of a reunion under a pixellated mountain of information, asphyxiating it into obsolescence. I've turned my back on the 20th century in every way imaginable. My oldest kid was born in '99 and I'm trying to see if I can offload him to a circus or an Amish family. The world moves too fast now. I don't have time for anything pre-2000. Not going is a stand on principle, one for which the rest of you will thank me when my example kicks over the card-house of rickety, reified "tradition" perpetuating itself for the sake of itself.

That and my ex-wife will probably be there. I could do something childish while I'm there like start a rumor about her, but I'm above all that. Besides, that, like everything else, would work way better on Facebook.