High School Reunion

It feels like my life is devolving into cliches. I mean a high school reunion is a pretty standard cultural cliche isn’t it? If my life was a sitcom, this would be a standard episode (probably somewhere around the 6th season when the writers were beginning to run out of ideas).

It’s not hard to see why high school reunions have become standard fodder for sitcoms and movies. There’s a lot of emotions present and a lot of different ways you could go with this. You could go the old, “Has it really been 10 years already? Where has time gone? I feel like I’m still 18 at heart,” option.
Or you could go for the classic “What have I done with my life? I was supposed to have everything all sorted out by now and be rich and famous and show up all those people who wouldn’t talk to me in high school.”
Or you could just relive high school angst. High school is a pretty sucky time of life, and I think most of us spend the rest of our lives trying to recover in one way or another from high school.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the first few options because they popped up on this blog before in various incarnations. And from reading your blogs I know I’m in good company on most of this. I guess it’s all something we’re dealing with as we go through our 20s.

I once read in a psychology textbook that time does actually go faster as you get older. The reasoning being that when you’re young you’ve got less time behind you and so a year is a comparatively long part of your life. The more years you’ve lived, the less of a percent each year becomes, and the years seem like they go by faster.

In addition to this, let me add my own personal theory that life starts to go faster because you have less milestones to mark it by. When you’re in high school, every year is distinct. Freshman year is different that Sophomore year, and Junior year when you get the driving license is certainly a lot more different than both. Whereas the 5 years I spent in Japan all kind of run together in my memory as one lump. This is why, for example, the 3 years I spent in middle school from 6th through 8th grade seemed like a mini-eternity for me, but the 3 years in which I watched my Japanese students make the same journey just flew by.

Also in addition to the outer milestones, we develop inwardly as well. When you’re 17, you listen to different music and have different tastes than when you’re 14.
But when I think of my 18 year old self, that is more or less who I am today. Sure I’ve refined a bit, smoothed out a few rough edges, and hopefully added some new levels of my sophistication to my thinking, but at the base level that is when I first started to emerge as the person I am today.

I think part of being in our 20s is that for the first time we realize that time is now passing faster than it used to, and we have to make our peace with it. Which is why the blogosphere is filled with 20 somethings writing on this exact same topic. Search “Quarter-Life Crisis” on blogger and see how many thousands of entries you get. (41,140 the last time I checked).

Okay, that angle put to bed, let me see if I can tackle the high school angst one. Accurately summing up high school experience is an endeavor always doomed to failure, but I’ll have a crack at it anyway.

Phil Christman had a blog entry this summer about the invitation he received to his high school reunion, and the emotions it provoked. I could really identify with a lot of it.

Although if I’m honest with myself, most of my own high school angst was not the result of being tormented by philistine classmates, but because of my own social awkwardness. Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone (we all know some people were actively persecuted in high school) but I think for many of us there is a danger of projecting the blame for a less than perfect high school experience outward onto former classmates.

And for that matter, I think most of my high school angst is actually post high school angst that I’ve retrospectively put into my memories. I mean, sure, I was a huge geek in high school. I was shy, I couldn’t talk to girls, and I spent my weekends watching “Star Trek”, reading comic books, and listening to The Beatles. But you know at the time I was perfectly happy being a geek, reading comic books, and listening to The Beatles. These were activities I did because I enjoyed them. I may have wished that I could be more popular, etc, but I had the natural optimism of all teenagers that eventually everything was just going to work out perfect, and by the time I was a little bit older I’d have life all figured out.

Later on I realized that while I had been huddled away in my room reading comic books, many of my classmates had been out partying and having various “Dazed and Confused” style adventures. And if not that, at least most of them had been having some social life in some form. And then I felt a tremendous sense of having missed out.

(This is a large reason why in college I was so concerned about not wasting any time by not watching any TV, not reading any books that weren’t for class, and in general not doing any passive activities at all. I guess I have a tendency to go from one extreme to the other. I know this rigidness drove a lot of you crazy back at Calvin, so sorry about that. )

Geography and private schools were also a factor in my feeling of isolation. My siblings and I all grew up in the private Christian schools. When each of us reached middle school, I think we all complained at one time or another that everyone at school knows each other from the Christian Reformed Church, and everyone at the Covenant Church we attended knows each other from the local public schools.

The same complaint was true to a lesser degree in high school, although once we moved on from the local Christian middle school to the big Christian high school, geography also became a factor. Where we lived, in the suburbs of Cascade, was considered the boondocks from the perspective of Grand Rapids Christian High. I got the sense (true or not) that everyone lived in the same neighborhood except for the 30 of us who came from Cascade/Ada.

(While I was in Japan, I really started to envy the neighborhood schools that my students had. They would walk home from school with their friends, and if they wanted to visit a friend’s house, they didn’t have to ask for a ride from their parents, they could just bike over. Even now that I’m back in my old neighborhood, I feel jealous when I see kids all walking home from school in a group. Or biking to each others house. Or running into each other at the local library or supermarket.)

Freshman year was really rough for me, as I guess it is for a lot of people. My little group from middle school didn’t stay together, and I was without any friends. While I was perfectly happy to stay home and watch “Star Trek” on Friday nights, the big problem was where to stand during noon break. Real friends would have been nice, but when everyone was hanging around I just wanted a group I could be part of to stand in. There’s nothing more awkward than standing alone.

For whatever reason (I’d try to theorize a reason, but I still don’t know why) things started to get better as I moved through the grades. By Junior year I noticed people were willing to tolerate me standing in their group. By Senior year I even started to get invitations to parties and stuff on the weekends. Some of this was because people found the quirks in my personality funny, but it seemed in a benign way and I felt they were laughing with me instead of at me. I even started to play up some of these quirks and make a bit of clown out of myself.

I even voted on the homecoming court senior year (which is one of those meaningless honors which somehow means so much at the time), at the end of the year I was selected to represent my class by speaking at the Senior Chapel, and I was voted by my classmates the friendliest person in the class of 96. But for all that, I didn’t have a single good friend in high school, or anyone I’ve kept in touch with in the years following.

I don’t know if Jared English remembers this, but he once quizzed a former high school classmate of mine, (or actually she was a year below me) what I was like in high school. She responded, “Oh, we all thought Joel was so funny. He actually thought he was popular by his senior year.” When Jared reported this back to me, any embarrassment or hurt I might have felt by this were vastly outweighed by the pride that a girl I didn’t even know existed in high school had been paying attention to what I had been doing. (You could argue this is negative attention, but then if you attempt to make that distinction, you obviously don’t understand the male mind).

Joking aside, there is probably a lot of truth in her assessment. Once I discovered I was socially climbing, I tried too hard to work my way into what I thought were the popular cliques. As much as I might like to make myself out as the good guy, I played the game as much as anyone in high school: try to be one of the popular and attractive people, and if that doesn’t work, than try to always stand next to them so that you can at least fool other people.

Useless Wikipedia Fact
McCartney revealed on PBS's Great Performances (Paul McCartney: Chaos and Creation at Abbey Road), aired in 2006, that the guitar accompaniment for Blackbird was inspired by Bach's Bouree, a well known classical guitar piece. As kids, he and George Harrison tried to learn Bouree as a "show off " piece. Bouree is distinguished by melody and bass notes played simutaneously on the upper and lower strings. McCartney adapted a segment of Bouree as the opening of Blackbird, and carried the musical idea throughout the song.

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