that teenage feeling

The Journalist sent me a tres jolie pic of herself at her high school reunion. I kept admiring her simple-but-sophisticated dress and her general jolie-ness, but also thinking "damn my effing lazy high school class president for not organizing one."

Not that I wanted to go, but I at least wanted that invitation to decline. I wanted the idea of a reunion I wouldn't go to. Thanks to Facebook, I found out that the sweet girl I met in the third grade who grew up to be a sullen goth girl by high school (but still sweet, asking me "have you read The Ballad of the Reading Gaol"?) grew up further to be a born-again Christian elementary school teacher in Forth Worth; the capitalist douchebag who I recall making spirited defenses of brutal capital punishment in debate and who used to brag about playing hockey with one of Michael Eisner's kids grew up to be a neo-Marxist sociology-major Peace Corps volunteer who is trying to help out Nicaragua's local telecommunications in a Green way; and that one couple who kept breaking up actually ended up getting married. All things that make you say "go fig," and also "wow, some people really did stay the same and stay in the same home town."

Facebook has pretty much obliterated the need for me to wax nostalgic, or wonder what happened to that guy I had a crush on (he got fat! and then he got married!) and I even found my ex-boyfriend and realized that wow, he is pretty immersed in the World of Warcraft gaming community. Does this make you older readers want to cry for me? Don't! I am so grateful that I have a low-cost way to learn about former classmates without too much pain to my introverted, misanthropic self! I have only two friends from high school I stay in touch with--on a weekly basis, over the phone, as they're my best friends. Thus, everyone I wanted to keep in touch with, I did. Everyone else was an acquaintance, a classmate, someone I'd like to know what was new with, but not someone I needed to see again or hang out with again. I don't even know what "catching up" means--I generally don't fall out of contact with people I seriously befriend, and it seems like a monumental task to go over 10 years of life with someone with whom you shared two years of American History.

When one has no glory days to rehash, there seems to be little incentive. Unfortunately, there's no movies made about loners like me who make friends on an individual, ad hoc basis, retaining only a few through each period of life. I have no large group of friends or group of people who know each other (actually, the closest is bloggy friends who "know" each other through blogs). But there's no crew of homies. So, no movies about us social misfits and how we hang out with people one at a time and eat lunch mostly by ourselves, even at school, and spend most of our downtime alone or with a significant other.

Ah, but there is a song. I don't miss being a teenager (Going to Prom stag because the guy I asked said no and because I was on the Prom Committee and wrote a really bad poem for the brochure? MUN conferences I always placed second in? Gah!), but I do get this song, mainly because it's what's adults feel whenever they miss, momentarily, being young and thrilled by a new experience (namely love):



H/T to Jason M. for reminding me how much I love this song.