After the Turkey Day

I hope all you American readers had a happy Thanksgiving! Heck, I hope my blog actually HAS readers ... I really don't update it often enough to get any kind of following.

I will spare you the boring details of my actual Thanksgiving with mom, dad, aunt, & grandma. I stuck around for six days, and just before I flew back to L.A., I went to my ten year high school reunion. With trepidation. I was a shy, artsy loner in high school, and my way of coping with a misspent youth was to not remember much about it. Therefore, I was worried that I wouldn't remember or recognize anyone at the reunion. I decided to go because I keep in touch via email with a few friends from high school. I also had contact with a few more people from my class of 1996 via MySpace (isn't that site amazing?). I figured if nothing else, it would be cool to blog about the experience.

You know, I'm glad I went. I didn't invent Post-it notes or anything to brag about, but I found some cool people whom I never talked to when I was in high school. Maybe we never shared classes, or maybe I was too shy. In any case, it was like meeting them for the first time, in a setting where we all had something to talk about to break the ice. There were a few people whom I remembered being friendly with, and they were as nice as I'd remembered. And what about the so-called "popular kids", the cliques? They became ordinary. Or rather, I saw them as ordinary in a concrete way for the first time. Some seemed much nicer than I remembered, which I'm sure is an aspect of my memory and not a fundamental change in their personality. I was amused by how a few people were much taller or shorter than I remembered. I have no idea what happened there. As far as location goes, I was surprised by how many stayed in New Hampshire. It's a small enough state that the borders are never more than an hour's drive, maybe two hours. I was also surprised by how many from my class became teachers. I guess that shouldn't surprise me, since we were between Harvard and Dartmouth, and New England tends to be big on education. And ten years leaves a lot of room for marriage, so quite a few people showed up with bored spouses. A few high school sweethearts got married, some pairings that seemed strange to me. I wasn't the only single there, although I thought it skewed towards women. Oh well!

One of these days, I'm going to write an article about why I don't like New Hampshire. I mean no offense to those who like it. The things that I find repulsive (statewide headlines about a telephone pole getting knocked over, for instance) are the same things that attract people to that state, in ways I understand. But there can be no doubt that I exist more easily on the West coast. The people are different, the atmosphere is different, the climate, the houses, the terrain, the wildlife, the businesses, and everything is different. I think I'm happy for the reminder every once in a while. When I went to my high school reunion, I saw a few glints of the things that irritate me about people from my home town, and I sort of breathed a sigh of relief when I got on the plane.