10 Years

I’m officially getting old.

It is very sad.

This weekend I will be attending my 10 year high school class reunion. A decade has passed since I graduated... How did that happen? I’m not quite sure. I’m almost 30 and I don’t feel much older than I did when I was released from the public school system.

I wonder if there will be anyone interesting at the reunion. There were like 600 people in my class and yet I would be hard pressed to name even 50 of them. Where were these other kids? Maybe they were all delinquents and never came to school.

My non-delinquent group of friends won’t be going to the reunion, so myself and a few brave souls will go and represent our clique. The others didn’t feel the need to go because they say that we already hang out with anyone that we care to remember from our high school days. And given the fact that there are roughly 30 of us that still keep in pretty regular contact, I can see their point. They are all planning a dinner for the same night as the reunion, and they are trying to convince us reunion-goers to ditch the reunion and join their party. Something tells me that there will be other parties with the people I’ve actually kept in touch with, so I’m gonna go say hi to some other people I haven’t seen in 10 years and probably won’t see for another 10 years.

Honestly there is only one guy that I have any interest in seeing at all. He was pretty much the only guy that didn’t stay in touch with our big group. He is insanely ambitious and has spent the last 10 years moving around and up the ranks of the United States government. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if he ran for president someday. I feel like this may be my chance to get on his good side and perhaps get some sort of tax break when he finally makes it to the White House.

But other than that guy I can’t think of anyone I really need to see. I’m ridiculously good at keeping in touch with people and so anyone I’ve ever been found of is still pretty much in my life. But you never know. Maybe some of the Rah Rah girls got fat, or some of the brainiac dorks got cute. These are the kinds of things I need to go investigate.

The other night I opened up a bottle that I’ve had for the past 10 years. I’ve moved this damn bottle with me everywhere I’ve moved (and that has been A LOT of places). It is an old empty Snapple bottle that has contained three rough paper towels for 10 years. On those paper towels me and two of my friends wrote out our dreams the night before we graduated. We were going to bury the bottle and then come dig it up on our ten year reunion. But something happened and we didn’t bury it. Instead I kept it. Because you all know how I hate to throw things away.

I opened it the other night and found my dreams hastily scribbled on the paper towel we had taken from a random public bathroom in the middle of the night, mere hours before we were going to graduate. I vaguely remembered what I wrote on the paper towel, but over the years I always wondered if I was even close to what I’d wanted to be back when I was new.

As I read the paper towel I realized that I haven’t really changed that much at all, and I think that is a good thing:

“.....I want to be wealthy. But most importantly I want to be happy and satisfied with who I am and where I’m going. I want to promise myself to never let myself stop living. I want to live life to the fullest and constantly be doing new things and make myself try everything at least once...I want to have kids but only when I’m 100% completely ready and I want to raise them well so that they are good people....Never grow old and never stop making memories.”

It seems that I have always been a bit introspective.

Funny thing is, I don’t think my wants have changed much. Although now I’d really like to be wealthy, screw the happiness...