April 13, 2005

Class reunions

I helped plan my last class reunion with, among other, my friend Elvis. (Elvis is not this guy's real name, but I'm not going to use real names, duh...) Anyway, Elvis, a few others, and I had to scramble to get something together; we had something like a month and a half to do this in. Elvis was the RSVP person, only because I had written, typed, folded and mailed the invitations. Anyway, Elvis gets varied responses from former classmates, but ONE was just hysterical.

I'll call this guy Mr. Snitty, and his RSVP was a doozy. He wrote a brief paragraph to Elvis (going so far as to address him as "Mr. Whooziwhoozit" --come on, no real names!) and said that he didn't know how we got his address, but we were not to send him anything in the future about our reunion "bullshit" or he would take legal action against us!

Everyone who was remotely involved with this reunion was just howling with laughter at this one. I made copies and put one on each table at the dinner, and we all read it and we all laughed and said how stupid this guy was acting. Okay, you don't want to go, fine you don't want to be contacted in the future. Couldn't Mr. Snitty have said "Please do not contact me in the future" instead? It would have made him look a lot less like an immature boob and he certainly wouldn't have been laughed at.

Why am I telling you this? Well, with all the crap going on at schools these days (hello, MN school shooting? Columbine?) I wonder just what drives a kid to such measures as to go shoot up people he's probably known since elementary school. Yeah, we all pick and get picked on, but what makes it so bad these days?

I never had a VCR, cable TV, a computer, none of that when I was growing up, and I guess where I grew up lead to a pretty sheltered life. Yeah, I got into the booze and cigarettes after school, and I'm not saying I was a "Marcia Brady" or anything, but going to school with a gun? Please. Guns were so common place with the people I knew, for Pete's sake, ever heard of deer season?

What leads a kid to worship Satan or Hitler? Can anyone, especially a teenager, tell me what the hell is so difficult about just being a damn kid these days? Sure, not all of us are popular, jocks, cheerleaders....and I won't say I was picked on, but I wasn't necessarily an outcast or anything.

But COME ON, high "skrewl" is an unfortunate part of everyone's life. And who we are then is NOT who we are now, right? Can we agree that we've grown over the years? My god, I've been out of high "skrewl" for, hmmm...17 years now (!!!!!!!) and I would hope I'm not that same person I was back then. At least I know I'm not a damn liberal Democrat (eeeewwww) anymore.

So, to anyone who reads this, I guess the moral is twofold: get over high school crap, life is just to short to dwell on that; don't send nasty-grams ala Mr. Snitty to your reunion committee or you may just have them read all over the place and you'll be laughed at for the immature boob that you still are!!!

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