mostly the pictures serve to reassure me that i made the right decision. okay, obviously hawaii was great, and no matter what i would not have been sorry not to be there instead, but that might be resulting just a little bit. but anyway, in the pictures, mostly it's the cool kids. i guess one of the social experiments of going would have been to see if the cool kids gave me the time of day these days (i should note that to some extent i was not ostracized in high school so much as i was quiet and shy -- shocking, i know, and there was some ostracization, and probably if i had tried to make friends there would have been more), but basically there was one person there i was actual friends with in high school, at least one pictured person.
and it would have been nice to see adam hulse, but i think mostly if i had gone it would have been sort of awkward and largely pointless. (admittedly the pictures are from the people who took them, so they also trend towards the cool kids; maybe there were other people there i was friends with.) i was struck by a few other things. first of all, some of these people look much, much older 10 years later. which probably implies that i look much older than i did at 16. i mean, obviously this is true, but my self-image in terms of appearance hasn't really changed at all. it's sort of a sobering thought.
secondly, i was surprised at how many people i was unable to recognize. i mean, i would have claimed to be able to recognize everyone in my graduating class when i graduated; certainly i didn't know all of them personally, and there were 800, but i think i could have done at least 80% of them. but these pictures often had me wondering who these people used to be. a puzzle. i think a lot of them were allison hornstein, who i think had curly hair in high school (not that i knew her personally), so that's sort of excusable. but man, a number of these people just don't look familiar.
the other thing i noticed was the ridiculous segregation. i thought of my school as segregating the black kids, but with the white kids and asian kids mixed. but in most of these pictures, the white kids are with the white kids, and the asian kids are with the asian kids. (apparently indians count as white for the purposes of this self-segregation.) i mean, that wasn't really true in my social group (such as it was), but i guess i never noticed it. i wasn't exactly the most socially attuned kid in high school.
anyway, i don't regret not going to this, even though the next one is probably the 20-year in 2016, very far off. and people will have kids and stuff. (one last thought: a surprising number of these people seemed to be there alone, countervailing the fact that most of my friends are in relationships. i wonder if that's just an artifact of the circumstances, i.e. that the pictures naturally focus on '96 grads.)
and now it's back to work.