Blasts from the past

My high school was probably like your high school. Large, public, set in an upper-middle class suburban enclave overrun with white people in Abercrombie with an affinity for plastering Grateful Dead stickers all over their mother's Range Rovers, oblivious to the irony. Some were smart, others, well, not so much. We had just as many students matriculate to Harvard and Duke (and even one to Cambridge!) as to Central Connecticut State and Salve Regina. We had the token homosexual (who was my prom date) and a few minorities sprinkled in. Teenage alcoholism was rampant, and Dave Matthews was our patron saint.

Rarely will you have anything in common with your classmates other than the fact that they've seen you eat paste and have urinary "accidents", and friendships were birthed out of shared geography, not common ground. Thus, high school friendships dissolve, and probably rightfully so, after college, careers, and geographies separate people. Or so I thought.

Dicking around MySpace one day, I developed a bizarre curiousity regarding the present circumstances of my old high school classmates, none of whom I keep in touch with.

So, here's what I found out, other than that a significant amount of them have "Top Friended" each other (to use MySpace vernacular):

1) The Popular Guy (or one of them) lost his lacrosse scholarship at some no-name college for reasons related to the drink, matriculated into another no-name college, joined and quit the Air Force and now is finishing up his diploma. Page indicates pride in his delinquency.

2) Very few people live in large cities other than Boston. A few people live in towns with unfamiliar names along the Eastern seaboard. One person is currently living in Tokyo, and I had a fleeting urge to email him.

3) There are a surprising amount of people who have gotten married to other people just as mediocre as they are. Girls overwhelmingly tend to look fat in their wedding dresses, and wedding pictures often hit the level of PROM on the tacky scale. The art of camp-free nuptials seems lost on them.

4) The pretty girls are still just as pretty, and twice as vacuous. The average girls that somehow struck it lucky and became popular definitely suffered from some stock-droppage. However, they have all seemed to do better for themselves (in terms of looks and career) than their male counterparts.

5) There were surprisingly few coming-outs, but that's to be expected from a town that pathetically associates the phrase with deb balls as opposed to anything GLBT-related. Yet, they still vote blue. You have to love Northeastern liberal hypocrisy.

6) The couple that had been dating since the 8th grade is now married and living in my hometown, in a house not too far from that in which they grew up.

7) They actually patronize the dirty neighborhood bars when they are home for Thanksgiving. And, apparently, "everyone and their mother" is present.

8) I have absolutely nothing in common with 90% of these people, yet, they seem to have copious amounts in common with each other, even after near a decade has passed since high school graduation.