a note on the 20-year reunion

[rinue]

p.s. The high school reunion was fun in that I like those people and was glad to see them. However there were two conversations I wish hadn't happened but knew would happen.

One was "you look great now and who would have believed because you used to be overweight." Which I was not. I was 15 pounds heavier than now, at most. It's more like I was in costume. I deliberately wore baggy clothing because I did not want that kind of attention as a 15 year old. It is dumb it that worked so well or mattered to anybody.

Two was "aw you're so smart we figured you would have cured cancer by now, how disappointing." The amount of time I've spent in my life at art schools does not change everybody's hope that miraculously I will make a medical breakthrough. And I appreciate everyone's faith but this is not a thing I have ever pursued so please don't put that on me. I do culture. And nerdy-ass historical research. Put another way, I have never believed it is possible to escape death. All you can do is pass on what you know so someone else can continue the work.

I am also not at all confident I managed to convey to these people how much they have meant to me and influenced me all these years, in the best way. I'm better at these things in writing than in person.

Comments

[sabotabby]

And this is why I never want to go to a high school reunion. Though really, everyone I want to keep in touch with from high school, I'm still in touch with, and they know that I'm still chonk and haven't accomplished much.

[rinue]

I'm not generally a reunioner (or graduation attender), but this particular group of people is a small class of art students from a school specifically founded on the principal of desegregation and the importance of having a broad social conscience, so pretty uniformly, everybody I graduated high school with is either still doing art or has gone into law, teaching, or nursing. And there's some advantage to seeing them in person because a lot of us are pretty cagey about what we put online (myself included), but it's also just reassuring to touch base with good people in the world. I spent a not insubstantial amount of time nerding out with a classmate's husband about how to transition energy policy in Texas to renewable energy and how quickly it's already happening, because he one of the main scientists advising the government on that. And then another classmate is very involved in running a lot of shipping out of New Orleans? It was cool.