reunions epitome of incomprehensibility I just found out there's a 20-year high school reunion Saturday. This is mildly terrifying. I mean, it's casual - a picnic in a park - but I have a tutoring class ending at the time it starts, so people might have strayed from the X on the map by the time I arrive. Also, 2005 was 20 years ago?? Plegh. Even when you're not old you feel old. Reunion(s) because there's also an academic talk tomorrow morning (Irish Studies / James Joyce / Bloomsday stuff) and one of the speakers is a guy I know from the Ontario university I went to in 2011-2012. He was an upper year undergrad when I was doing my Master's of Procrastination. And in the Finnnegans Wake reading group. Probably a professor now. The terrifying part with that? He might know about everyone shunning me because I attacked my only friend in the program in a bar fight. That's the flippant version, but it was pretty horrible because I hit my classmate in the face with a glass (left-handedly and without realizing I had something in my hand, but it broke and cut their nose). The thing is, they weren't even fighting me. They were trying to break up an argument between me and someone else. The other girl WAS being belligerent in a drunken way, but it was my friend's restraining hand on my shoulder that struck my tired and also uncharacteristically drunk self as something to strike out against. And five others in my class witnessed this. It was right before we went our separate summer ways to work on our research projects, but whenever I saw the others, they treated me with deliberate distance. I don't know how far the news got, though. I think I did see him after that and he didn't seem to treat me differently. Anyway, in my parents' living room today, I joked to Mom about saying to him "I don't hit people in the face anymore!" in a chipper voice. She gave me a look of reprimand. So maybe I should modify this to "I never got a PhD, but at least I don't hit people in the face anymore!" Honestly? Progress. Now what to tell people from my high school if they ask what I've done these past twenty years? ...This is a problem, since I never hit any of THEM in the face. 250612 ... raze is it weird that i feel like i've missed out by not having one? it's not even that there are many people i'd want to see from high_school. it's just a thing that hasn't happened, and it feels like it should have at some point — whatever awkwardness it might have entailed. the only reunion i ever heard of anyone trying to put together for my graduating class was spearheaded by pete gatfield when we hit the ten year mark. he threw in the towel pretty early in the game after realizing how much work was involved. and that was with facebook to take a lot of the guesswork out of the equation. i'm guessing he found out the same thing i did: when it comes to assembling a group of any kind, there's often an ocean of space between what someone tells you and what they're willing to do. next year it'll be a quarter of a century since we graduated. i doubt anyone will do anything to mark the occasion. it isn't an accident that all the dreams i've had about school reunions involve the friends i knew in grade school. in a lot of ways, those early years looked more like what i thought high school was going to be than the reality did. even if few of them seem to recognize or remember me, it's always a comfort to see some of my earliest crushes and confidants. 250613 ... nr our school never has these, except for the occasional reunion for the school itself. i went to its 60th anniversary celebration in 1965. some people i knew were there, but most weren't. i'm guessing social media has caused these not to be as in demand. but sometimes i also wonder what it would be like to see people from so long ago, especially people i may have been intimidated by back then but have learned them to be nice, good people in adulthood. sometimes i wonder if a reunion would offer a second chance to actually approach them. but maybe i'd just end up regressing in that environment anyway. 250613 ... erm i actually went to its 60th anniversary in 2005. 250613 ... nr "have learned them?" ...this is what happens when your brain isn't moving fast enough for your fingers. or something. 250613 ... e_o_i nr, you can't hide it now, we've found out you're a time traveler :) About the thing today, I got to Concordia too late and the classroom door was closed. Part of the lecture looked to be on Zoom anyway, so I might not have had a chance to chat with the Ontario person I knew a little. Instead I went to the mezzanine and worked on some writing. But I think I'll go to the reunion tomorrow, even if I'm late. I had a list of people and faces of classmates that slipped behind a shelf somewhere, so good luck for remembering names even if I remember faces. The faces of FACE (fine arts core education, but gross sciences periphery forgetting). 250613 ... ovenbird I've never been to a high school reunion either and I have very mixed feelings about the possibility of ever going to one. There aren't many people I would actually want to see, but there is definitely some curiosity about what became of people. The best reunion I ever attended was actually a small-ish gathering of people who all participated in the Ontario Rangers program when we were 17. We pilgrimmaged back to the camp we spent the summer at in Northern Ontario to celebrate our 40th birthdays together. It was magic! 250614 ... e_o_i So much for this! I couldn't find anyone and so I just sat against a tree in the park, reading a book and snacking. Probably people decided to go and take a tour of the school, as they said they'd do, so by the time I got there, no one was left. I was almost two hours late; blame my tutoring shift, the Grand Prix traffic, and my insistence on buying cookies to share. I should have given my number to the classmate who invited me and asked her to text me people's location, but Thursday and Friday were filled with other things. I had a good hour of reading Alberta_Alone, book 3 of the_Alberta_trilogy by Cora Sandel. I highly recommend this, but don't get the Peter Owen edition, or if you do, cover up the back blurb. It tells too much of the plot. Anyway, I was all, "This is fun, I don't mind being by myself" until I got up to walk to the train station. Then loneliness struck, triggered by the heinous act of a woman I passed: she kissed the man beside her, such gall. I'm making fun of myself now, but then it was a pang of melancholy, everything_reminds_me, etc. Serious thoughts: what am I missing? Contact, not just sex-related. "Romance" is the missing piece? But that too could be surface-level, like lying in the sun together. You could have cuddles and shared excursions without... there we go, *love*. Bleak thought, that love is missing. Reasonable Brain: But don't forget, you have other people you love and who love you. Sad Brain: Granted, but I'm missing the one I loved the most. You can't argue me out of that. Goofy Brain: No, she can't, but *I* can distract you. And so my goofy brain thought, Hey, what's if my former classmate, whom I saw again recently at the Westmount Finnegans Wake group, decided to assassinate me? It was a plot, she had thirty of her other contacts pretend to go to this specific place, but really she'd hired an assassin to hide in the bushes with an automatic weapon. Her mistake: she assumed I'd be on time. The assassin got bored of waiting and left. But maybe I should have met him (my brain gave a gender to this sniper). Maybe he would see me reading and hesitate. Because, see, it wasn't Maeve who was trying to kill me, it was someone in the Israeli government who'd misconstrued something I'd written as a threat. But I'd look peaceful, sitting there reading, so he'd go up to me and question me instead. And then I'd give him my anarcho-pacifist spiel and he'd say, "That makes me think. For a while I've been thinking of quitting Mossad and living a less tense existence. I was reading Noam Chomsky and I don't agree with everything he says, but...I really want to study linguistics now." So he'd move to Montreal and enroll at McGill or Concordia and we'd fall in love. I'd support his academic work and he my creative work. Except after a while he'd get discontent and say, Well, maybe I was just using you to get a green card. And I wouldn't say, Look, there isn't a "green card" here, you're in Canada. I would just be sad. Pah. Even in my daydreams I can't escape a breakup. Anyway, as far as reunions go, it was slightly creative. 250614 what's it to you? who go blather from