High School Reunions
So, it's coming up on 10 years since I graduated from high school, and I'm starting to get notices about the 10 year reunion plans. At this point, I'm not sure that I want to go. I was thinking that if I did go, that I should go stag, as my wife doesn't know any of my high school classmates. I only still speak (infrequently) to about 2 people I went to high school with. There are few I wouldn't mind getting in touch with again, but I don't know if they'll show up. The reunion date is in August, so I've got a little time. To add a little more background, I went to an all-boy's catholic high school, and the reunion would be with my classmates, as well as our "sister" school, the all-girls catholic school down the street.
Post your experience with high school reunions, and any advice on the subject.
Thanks in advance.
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High school reunions are only for hooking up with those chicks you missed in high school.
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Any person you wanted to really keep in touch with, you probably already do.
Unless you have a morbid curiosity to see how anyone is doing, who got fat and who's a loser, I'd skip it. The really successful people are probably too busy to bother anyway.
Maybe if you want another shot at some girl you really liked, and you think she's still single after 10 years...
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I think my high school mates think I'm dead. Haven't heard a peep and it's coming up on ten years this June.
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15 years here, and I only got one or two emails through classmates.com from a guy I used to have a bunch of classes with when my 10 year reunion was coming up. I haven't kept in touch with anyone from high school and I had little or no desire to spend a couple of hundred dollars (tickets were $75 a pop) to go and hang around a bunch of d*cks I didn't like when I was 18.
"Hey honey, see that guy over there?"
"Yes"
"Total f*cking prick. I wonder if he's changed?"
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Yeah. This sounds like a bad idea at 18. I mean, I still help out at wrestling practices every now and then, but there are a lot of dicks in high school.
*Legion* wrote:
For some reason, I don't think you're going to find a lot of interest in high school reunions here, on a tech/gaming website. Besides Mex, GWJ's apparent chick magnet, I wouldn't imagine that most of us have a lot of pleasant high school memories.
I've got a few years to go before I start hearing about any kind of reunion (2011 would be 10 years for me), but I've never had any intention of going. I don't even have your problem... my wife and I were the class couple, and voted most likely to get married, so she knows all the same people. So it's like, ["They're all dicks" x 2]. I had maybe 3 friends back then, and I've somewhat kept in touch with all of them through the years to see how they're doing.
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This is the single largest motivating factor in making me want to go back. It makes me think that perhaps I'm the dick that everyone will be remembering
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Well, perhaps (again) I'm the odd man out: I enjoyed my high school reunions. Then again, I mildly enjoyed the last two years of high school, which would sort of seem to be a prerequisite.
I've always been fascinated by the amount of importance that a lot of people tend to put on these events: how do I look, what's my CV look like, who's going to be there, etc. To me, it was a reason to go see what happened to a lot of people. I went in with no expectations, a lot of curiosity, and fairly good self-esteem. So I figured what's the worst that could happen? Its not like it was going to be MORE socially awkward than high school. if the event sucked, I'd just leave.
What ended up happening was I caught up with a fair amount of people, was amazed how much kinder the 20s are to women than men, but mostly spent time more or less "meeting" classmates I never really knew, but who turned out to be pretty damn interesting. I think, like me, they were there all along but flew under the radar in high school. I ended up keeping in touch with a few to this day (15 years after the reunion). Perhaps not coincidentally, they came with much the same attitude. We had no glory days to relive, but felt our lives were pretty okay at the moment.
So unless you've got to travel a long way, pay a lot of money, or otherwise inconvenience yourself considerably, I'd say give it a go. What's the worst that could happen?
Let the anecdotes commence....
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Actually, high school was my best public schooling experience. It was elementary and middle school that was a living nightmare. Imagine being teased every single day for no less than seven years (give or take a year). I had no friends to speak of, though I did have two in fourth grade. One got hit by a truck and died, the other turned into a prick.
In high school, I didn't get teased, I had friends, and I started getting into things like writing, theater, and poetry.
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I echoed most of the opinions in this thread back when my 10 year happened and didn't go. Now my 20 year is a couple of years away and I'm seriously considering going. So don't worry about it if you don't want to go to this one.
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Funny, someone said this to me at my 10 year reunion. And it wasn't true for me. The few people I would have wanted to see at my 10 year did not show up. It was a terribly disappointing event for me.
Fedaykin98 wrote:
I would want to go out of morbid curiosity, as well. Especially because right after high school, I found out two of the star football players kidnapped their meth dealer, tied him to a stake outside of town and burned him alive because he threatened to kill them if they didn't pay him back! Good times! I'm really curious to see which of the "popular kids" actually left the Antelope Valley and didn't die or get knocked up (ie, success stories, such as my own
). Especially because all through high school, they were the only ones to win any votes in the yearbooks (most popular, most likely to succeed, etc) since they were the ones making the yearbooks. History is written by the winners, right? Now I just want to see how true that might be in my school's case.
dhelor wrote:
My high school class was fairly small (105 people), and while I still have 2 best friends from high school, I didn't exactly keep in touch with anybody else. And yet....I had a really nice time at my 10 year reunion. Also some culture shock (it was an event sans kids, but I found out just how many classmates had 3 or 4 kids; most of my class still lives within a 20 mile radius of the high school). But people mellow. It was nice to catch up with the nice people. Good to see the asshats had mellowed, gotten humbled, or gotten seriously fat.
But mostly it was just kinda cool to see people. I had a small circle of friends in high school, plus the choir kids, but I was friendly enough with what clicks there were. We were a bit too small for the jocks to be just jocks (2 high scorers on basketball team were in top 10 academically), and nerds to be nerds. Hell, I even had a varsity letter (for tennis...very manly).
Movies certainly make it seem like crazy things are going to happen. All of the truly crazy stuff happened before the reunion (like the all-state wrestling asshat going from 95 lbs to 400 lbs comes to mind). And hey, some of that's pretty damned funny to see. Maybe it's just nostalgia glow. I didn't even mind the still-as-perky cheerleader who wanted updates on all relationship things (kids, marriages,...affairs...whatever she could get.).
If nothing else, it gives you some perspective on how cool you are now.
Too easy.
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I have nothing to add to the main topic of this thread as I have only been out for a few years... or is it seven? Really? Wow...
And not to be a *beep*, but if you take a year, that is less than seven years. I am sorry, but my mathematical/grammatical side just couldn't help it.
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*Legion* wrote:
I recently got in touch with a bunch of my classmates from a Russian equivalent of Classmates.com (we graduated in 1994). Quite a picture.
Everyone got married. Most have kids. People who are still in USSR have bloated physically more than people who managed to get to America.
Most notably, there was a girl of whom I thought as a missed chance all these years. She seemed to operate on the same wavelength back in high school... and talking with her now has been a giant disappointment. Not because she's married and has a kid, no. Not because she's let herself go. But because she started calling me "honey" this and "honey" that and teaching me life lessons. When she learned I am making a videogame, to which I also referred as a "world", she became "terribly concerned for me" and tried to impart wisdoms by the way of being rude because "thats what true friends do".
There seems to be a pattern with my former classmates trying to impart wisdoms on me after all these years.
Oh yeah, and she also hinted she would leave her husband for me, and yes, he's the "love of her life".
Also, my best friend in USSR wanted to come visit, we gave him specific instructions on the right people to talk to to get a VISA, he completely ignored them (out of Soviet Pride(tm) apparently) and got rejected.
That's another thing all these guys project. They desperately want to go to America but pretend like it's nothing special compared to the third world country living conditions they are still in.
WTF is wrong with these people ...
I hear the most notorious gangbangers from our class have actually mellowed out and changed, but some events in life one just never gets over. If I ran into them somehow and saw even a gleam in their eye that hints of their former behavior, I would зап**деть them нах** to the point where they lie for 3 hours on the floor waiting for the speedy Russian ambulance to arrive.
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I didn't have a great time in High School so I too skipped my 10 year reunion (last year). There is only one person from High School I still keep in touch with, and I was on my honeymoon anyway.
I wasn't at all interested in my 10 year reunion. Now, my 20 year reunion is coming up in July, and I am thinking about it (I've got the registration form on my desk right now).
I figured that everyone I would want to stay in touch with I had, but last year I stumbled on a web site for my high school class (a sort of classmates.com knock-off). When I started reading through the entries people had made, it was one instance after another of, "Oh, I'd forgotten all about ___. I really liked [him|her], now I am sorry we lost touch. It would be great to catch up." At this point, if I can talk a few of my friends from high school (who I have stayed in touch with) to go, then I think I will go.
Maybe 10 years just isn't long enough to feel like there were connections with friends that have been lost.
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Our 20th was last year, and I've didn't go. I didn't go to the 10th either. I went to school with my ex and his family lives in that town too, and I just didn't want to have to explain. My mom still lives in the town I grew up in so I get all the gossip anyways.
Duoae wrote:
Excellent! Now I know what to post in the "irrational fears" thread.
*Legion* wrote:
Eh, that's what MySpace is for. And it's cheaper than a plane ticket.
Happy?
Oh, and PS, thanks for making light of my depressive childhood.
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High School was... weird for me. I just kinda went through it as best I could, not worrying over much. I never joined clicks, was acquaintances with most people, friends with the "outsider" kinda group, and never kept in touch with anyone after I went to college. Then again that's my pattern, I also lost touch of most of my elementary school, junior high, and college classmates so no huge shock there.
But around my Senior year I learned I had several reputations. Some good, some bad, but pretty much all of them different. That was... disconcerting for some reason. If I end up going to the tenth anniversary reunion (two more years) I'm not really sure what most people's reactions to me will be, even if they do remember me.
That said my advice would be to go if you can easily afford it. It gets you out, you might have a good time and the worst that happens is you loose some money and don't have the best of nights. Of course if you think you'd get more pleasure spending $100 on a fancy dinner with your wife that might lead to a much better night.
Remember, only by treating everyone with dignity and respect can we maintain the element of surprise for that inevitable day when we wipe our enemies from the face of the Earth.
I'm probably not going to attend any high school reunions in the near future. High school was miserable for me, and like many teenagers, I treated most people around me like crap. Why would I want to go hang out with people who were mean to me/I was mean to for four years? No thanks.
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To rub your success in their faces, of course. Isn't that the whole point of reunions?
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I was just contacted out of the blue last week for my 20 year reunion. I had either been in Japan or on the 'lost' list for 5,10 and 15. Between university and then living in Japan, I had lost touch with my high school buddies for the most part, and never really slowed down enough to look them up again after returning. Besides, my wife is also my best friend, so I never really felt an urgency to hunt down folks.
I'm thinking of going, as my home town is only two hours away, but it probably depends on if my core friends are going to show up. After seeing the 100 dollar price tag, my wife immediately signaled that she was perfectly happy if I just went alone, she'd rather save that 100 bucks for something we can use.
One thing that struck me, was that the reunion webpage has an In Memory section, and I see two of my highschool friends have passed away relatively recently. I guess that is what happens as you hit 20+ year reunions, but it caused me to pause for a moment.
There is at least one person I'd have some mixed feelings about running into, but I guess a lot of time has passed and people are just people at this point.
Personally the reunion might provide one more goal for the 'get fit' program I started at end of January. I've cut about 26 lbs already with unfortunately more to go. My fitness goals were already in-place, but I could probably help leverage this mentally as one more motivator to work in. Still, I am really trying to make a fitness life change here, so at the sametime, I really don't want to place too much importance on the get-together.
I suppose my friends and I could sit around a table and offer up a toast in memory of Gary Gygax.... while the other folks ain't listening....
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Dhelor, I don't think anybody looks back on middle school and says "What a fantastic experience I would gladly do over the same exact way!" It is my secret theory that everyone in middle school was/is miserable, but the beautiful people just hide it better
I had a decent high school experience. However, my 10 year will be here in a coulple years and I don't plan on going. I've retained 3 friends from high school (one of whom is a frequent GWJ poster and got me to join) and that's all I want to remember about high school. I've managed to put all that petty sh*t behind me, there's no reason to bring it back up again.
And to be honest, I'm the one that swelled.
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That's kind of where I am. I'm not sure that I'll do 20, but I could see going eventually. I went to my 10 year reunion, and it was OK, but surprising to me how people hadn't seemed to have done much. I went to kind of a yuppie public school, and there seemed to still be a lot of rich kids delaying the reality of working for a living. I was one of two people who were married. All in all, it was kind of boring, but I remain hopeful that some future reunion would be interesting.
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