In the future there will be flying cars AND drive-thru liposuction

So, after 20 solid years of looking forward to NOT attending my 20-year high school reunion, it turns out I’m going.

Damn it

Before I even graduated from high school I was already looking forward to not attending any future reunions. I can remember lying on my bed, Walkman on, Depeche Mode playing, and thinking with great pleasure about never attending another official event with my schoolmates. I was confident that I wouldn’t care one teeny bit more about my graduating class in 1998 than I had when I graduated. And I was right.
I actually enjoyed blowing off the calls about my 10-year reunion from The Susans (the people I’d always assumed would end up organizing our reunions? Were spot on the actual people who ended up organizing both our 10th and 20th reunions. No lie.). Politely thanking them for calling me but no thanks, I would not be attending. Around 2003 I did pay to join Classmates.com for a year so I could get the e-mail addresses of the three people I really cared about that I’d lost contact with. And then I let my membership lapse.

And then I really didn’t think about it again. Other than how fabulous my ass used to be, and how it fun it was to run around kissing all the boys, I’m just not that nostalgic about high school. Then this spring My Favorite Twin started talking about wanting to fly out from Alabama and go to our 20th reunion. He really wanted to go. Having been popular and voted “Best Dressed” our senior year there are, quite understandably, people he wants to see again. So while I told him that I was not going to the actual reunion, I would drive down to Bakersfield to see HIM. Totally worth it and much easier than flying all the way to ALABAMA. So over the summer we’d been planning that. While a trip to Bakersfield is never something I look forward to I was really excited about getting to spend time with My Favorite Twin.

And then a totally unforeseen and unrelated event occurred a couple of weeks ago. It turns out that My Compatriot In Silliness, someone I’d thought had been one of my friends for over 20 years… uh… wasn’t. Apparently she had been pretending to have fun with me, pretending to like the gifts I sent and all around faking most of what I thought our friendship was, all out of fear that if she didn’t there would be horrible repercussions. Her words: “horrible repercussions”. She then included a long list of what had been, for me, fond memories and broke down how each time I thought we were enjoying ourselves and each other (many times while doing something silly) she was actually faking it as hard as she could in order to meet my endless sucking unreasonable need for my friends to enjoy my company. She seemed to think that by telling me all this it would strengthen our friendship in the future. No really. In short she totally yanked the rug of friendship out from under my clueless and not entirely steady feet and I landed on my emotional ASS going, “OW… that really HURT…what the FUCK just happened?”

(Yeah I know, not my best metaphor, roll with me)

So, since she’d pulled this little trick via e-mail I broke my own rule about NEVER forwarding other people’s e-mail and sent it to the three people in my world who have known both of us for a long time. I didn’t do it out of spite. I did it because I couldn’t stop crying and I needed to know if I really was a horrible demanding inflexible monster whose punishments for the slightest infractions really were that terrifying.

Luckily for me the vote was unanimously “She’s nuts, you are so NOT the devil, what the fuck?”

So I wrote back to her essentially saying “Hope you feel better now that you’ve gotten that off your chest because we are SO not friends anymore. Because that? Is so not what friendship is. Maybe you should get some therapy. PS Thanks for doing this less than a year after my mother died, bitch.” Okay, I didn’t include that last sentence but I really wanted to.

I’m sure you’re all wondering how this has anything to do with my reunion. I’m getting there.

Like a lot of people who have never really had the love and support of their officially designated nuclear family I’ve built a family out of my friends. I started doing this in high school.  I don’t make friends easily. I’m weird and I don’t really like people which can be a bit limiting. The friends I do make, I tend to hold onto. For decades. And as time passes and people change and grow and I change and grow I work very hard to make sure the friendship evolves to accommodate these changes. And I am usually pretty good at it. And tenacious. I’ve had friendships that have had rocky YEARS and still managed to survive. But My (former) Compatriot In Silliness literally burned our friendship to the ground leaving nothing, metaphorically speaking, but ashes. You know on the internet there will be pictures after a major fire where a house was burned to the ground but the only reason you know that is from the caption because looking at the photo all you can see is charred black lumps? That’s pretty much how I felt.

Pretty much what my heart felt like.

So a couple of days after all of this happened I was talking to a friend of mine and I can’t remember what I said to prompt his comment but he said, “Just because she sucks doesn’t make the rest of us BETTER friends.”
And I said “Oh no, in my head, it totally DOES make you better friends”

And for me, it really does. Picture my heart as a sort of pie chart that is made out of nine different-sized slices. A few of them are really big, some are thinner slivers. Now remove one of the largest slices. Now divide the percentage of that slice by 8 and evenly distribute that amount to each remaining slice. See how they all got fatter? Everyone who hadn’t been pretending to like me and lying to my face for years automatically became a BETTER friend as far as my heart was concerned. And for a few days I really did feel this conscious increased affection for all the people in my life who had not just ripped my heart out.

So My Favorite Twin, who I was already feeling pretty mushy towards because he was one of the people to read the letter of destruction and say “Dude, I always thought she was a kind of crazy but that was just NUTS” picked that moment to ask me to attend the reunion with him. He didn’t beg, because he has a rule about no longer begging me for things, but he came VERRRY close.

Here’s a short transcript of my capitulation, “fuck, FUCK, I don’t want to… but… FUCK… I really don’t want to go… I SO don’t want to go… fuck… crap…DAMMIT! Okay. Okay I will go because I love you SLIGHTLY more than I don’t want to go, but only a very tiny amount. Fuck.”

So I pinged The Susans to get confirmation that no, my kidnapping date-rapist ex-boyfriend wouldn’t be attending (I just really don’t want to be in a room with him, you know, ever) and then I RSVP’d.

So there you have it. If My Favorite Twin hadn’t gotten that extra push of goodwill from his newly increased slice of my heart I probably would have been able to hold out. But I couldn’t. Because all of the sudden something that I used to take for granted -- my friends really like me –now means more to me.

So to my reunion I shall go. If I’d known I was going to have to go I would have stopped eating carbs in like, February, but oh well. The 37-year-old woman I am totally doesn’t care. The 17-year-old girl the popular people tormented REALLY doesn’t want to give them the pleasure of seeing I’m no longer a size five. I was tempted to just stop eating completely between now and THE EVENT (Oct 11th) but I’d probably just get dizzy and fall down and hurt myself.

So instead I’ll just accomplish whatever is “reasonable” with my trainer, buy a fabulous dress and shoes or boots for the event and go. I rented a suite for My Favorite Twin and I and a town car (NOT a limo) and driver for us as well. While the only good thing I can say about the accursed event is at least they have the sense to hold it somewhere that sells alcohol I will be damned if I get arrested for drunk driving in my home town after my reunion. Because this is SO not the call I want to make, “Hey Dad… yeah, it’s me… uh yeah I’m actually in town… um… for my high school reunion… I was going to call you but things got so busy and um… I need a favor? Is there anyway you can come down to the courthouse and bail me out?”

Just No.  I will take a big ole pass on that and since My Favorite Twin felt that he himself might need a drink or two to cope, and his wife would have a bitch of a time bailing his ass out from Alabama, we’re getting a driver.

Next Up: THE CRUEL UNDERWEAR. Because as much as I work out and don’t eat between now and then it will never be ENOUGH so I am doomed to slinking into Nordstrom and buying some horribly constricting device to make me look another five pounds thinner. I’m sure just trying those things ON will warrant another entry.

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