Nostalgia

I almost feel like I got enough sleep last night. Almost. Maybe by the weekend I'll fell like I've caught up.

In other news: I got my annual email from a high school friend. We tend to only communicate once or twice a year, and our birthdays are 8 days apart, so she sends me a birthday email and then a week later I send one to her. I've been thinking about her recently anyhow, along with other high school classmates and what they might be up to. My friend is getting her MBA at Stanford and got married a couple of years ago. Plus, she's a marathoner, so she totally understood when she heard my LA Marathon Tale of Woe. This was the valedictorian of my class, voted Most Likely To Succeed, and has always been one of the busiest and most driven people I've ever met. She got a 100 hour a week investment banking job right out of college and I guess burned out last year so she's now getting another degree from Stanford. Pretty, athletic, nice, and genuinely human with a great snarky streak. Part of me wishes we lived in closer proximity to one another, as I'd love to see her in person and spend more time with the person she's become.

I've found other people from my past on MySpace, and there's something kind of deliciously voyeuristic about reading the details of the lives of people I spent so much time with as a kid/teenager. I've found classmates who are married, divorced, have kids, are still kids themselves. Recently, I found the page for a person who was both a high school classmate and a fellow UCBerkeley student (and a good friend at the time) - but the last time I saw her was when my friends kicked her and her stuff out of their house, because she'd turned into a speed freak and hadn't paid rent in months. Nobody else had heard from her or about her for years and I'm glad to see she didn't end up dead from the drugs.

I wonder whether the prurient interest I have in these people is only because I'm going to be seeing them in a few months and mentally comparing them to the people they were when we all knew each other 10 years ago. Or is it a projection of my own self trying to discover who *I* am now and whether *I've* changed that much in 10 years. I'd like to think that I have - I know I'm a lot less uptight, for one thing, and my mind has expanded to try to understand ideas and the other sides of issues that my mind was once made up about. I'm less self-conscious, don't care as much about what other people think of me. I'm happy in my own skin and I feel like I'm a complete person even without my primary relationship, as a function OF my primary relationship (he doesn't complete me, but he makes me feel like more of me than I did before).

My basics haven't changed much; I'm a little more muscular, a little curvier. I'm still the same height, still have longish brown hair, still read semi-voraciously, still curious about the world. I'm not married; I don't have children - but I do have a Person and two kitties, so that's something different, I guess. What's changed the most about me? I've been wondering to myself. I've been around Europe; I've been around the USA and to Toronto and even to Mexico (but only Tijuana and that doesn't really count); I've been to China. I've lived in big cities, lived alone, taken care of myself and other people. I've paid my bills and gotten jobs and lost jobs. I've been to Burning Man. I've stood on top of a 14,000 foot mountain in the middle of a lightning storm and lived to tell the tale.

I hope as many of my classmates as possible end up going to the reunion. I'd love to be able to tell everyone I haven't seen in 3 years or 5 years or 10 years that I am thankful for the opportunity to see the people they've become from the simple beginnings that were the school and community from which we all sprang. What I hope most is to see people happy in the lives they've lived thus far. I'm glad there will have been this time, though, because I needed college and life experience to gain some perspective on the little petri dish social experiment that was our high school. Because man, high school sucked while I lived it. It's so funny that I've become good friends with people FROM high school that I wasn't close with IN high school, but it's all because of that time and perspective.