i would first like to say that, oh my gawd, it is so good to be back on my computer. using my mom's oh-so pathetic little first-generation iMac with 32 megabytes of RAM was painful. i know she loves it but i actually think i felt pain while sitting at the keyboard.

now the reason i was sitting at my mom's computer was that i was up in Oregon for a very brief visit. and the reason i was visiting was that it was my ten-year highschool reunion. for those of you who have moved away from your hometown, maybe not kept in touch with many people, but have yet to experience a reunion, prepare yourselves for something weird. good but weird.

i walked into the room and saw all these faces that were familiar yet different, like i remembered them from a dream. the night before, when i was trying to count people from my class who i was expecting to see, i couldn't come up with very many. not that they were all that forgettable. it's just been ten years!

after i got over the shock, it was good. really good. i loved seeing all these people grown up, yet kind of the same. kids, marriages, (divorces,) careers, bad stuff, good stuff but we could still remember stuff like running from the cops in the middle of the night or who did what on newspaper staff. i dunno, something about it made me warm inside. these were good people.

of course, we were kind of a special class. everyone said so. we had very little of the usual highschool bullshit. cliques were more like interest groups and never exclusive. rivalries and fights and all that shit that i thought was made up just for bad '80s movies but isn't wasn't really a part of my class. one teacher remarked that we were the last class he saw with something really special. and, not to rub our own lanterns, but we were. special. and not the short-yellow-bus kind of special either.

so i got to reconnect with my class and a little bit of home i'd kind of forgotten. my absolute favorite reconnection was Mr. Andy Grant. he and i use to be buds back when being cool meant standing in front of the freezer looking for Otter Pops. we grew apart for whatever reasons that people do that sort of thing and never really hung out in highschool. but man, he's a cool cat. just as nice and smart and interesting as ever, but with this extra mature, hip, yeah that about him. i don't know if he grew into being so cool or he was just always that way, but i was really happy he showed up.

and that was one of many, many great reacquaintances. Mariam who's engaged, Laurie who finished her MBA at Stanford and wants to get into something with the film industry, Molly who's almost finished with her MBA at Stanford and who looked awesome, Danny who's a sergeant in the Marines, Matt who lives like four blocks from me now and i never knew it, Erin, Mike Wong, Tito, Amy, Sabrina, Kay, Becky, Andria, Jason, Brooke, Mr. Super Cool O'Dell, Bobby looking like the coolest cowboy ever, and even Andy who was in a coma for two weeks earlier this year and seemed to be recovering just fine. there were more and it's not that anyone i left out was insignificant, it was just overwhelming. of course, there were a few people who were missing (ahem, Andee Krasner, ahem, Sarah Tramontana) but i caught up on their lives as best i could through those who did show.

for a guy who almost intentionally lost contact with everyone from highschool so as to make a kind of fresh start, it was pretty cool to see all these people again. and now that i'm fully established on my own, maybe it's due time i tried to bring some of these people back into my life. you think?