Apparently I graduated from high school on this day 20 years ago. I would never have known this if it weren't for Facebook. FB is a really interesting social experiment still for me. My "friends" are an interesting mixture of people I actually see in real life on the regular, people that I still like but never see for various reasons (geography, time), people I'm meh about but keep in touch with for nostalgia (ex-coworkers), and —and this is the joint of this post —high school peeps.
The high school peeps...it's a weird situation, no way around it. I was friends with some of them and really enjoy catching up and seeing what they're up to these days. Then there are The Others. The Bullies. The Clique. The Popular Ones. The kids who laughed at me, made fun of my clothes, told me I smelled, teased me about being on welfare, and generally made my life kinda suck at times. The ones who even, at times, reduced me to tears. The ones who scared me. They send friend requests on FB, just throwing their net out like they literally picked up a yearbook and went through the list of names, looking everyone up and hitting the Request button over and and over again. What other reason could their be for them reaching out? They certainly didn't message me and apologize or try to make any kind of personal connection. I was just another name on their friend list. I don't understand their motivation, because it never even crossed my mind to look those people up. I had forgotten about them, and was glad for it.
Here's the really confusing part though. I don't know their motivation, and no one would expect me to, but I can be expected to know my own and for the life of me I cannot explain why I accepted their friend requests. Why I let myself get dragged into this strange world of retrofitting the past. To be fair, I don't think the worst of the offenders tried to reconnect. The guy who pulled his pants down and rubbed his ass on my shoulder? I've seen him comment on posts of mutual acquaintances but I haven't gotten a request from him. It may help that my first name is not the same. The requests that I have gotten from the worst of the worse? I've ignored. But there are a few that I let through. The girl who teased me in the bathroom in 4th grade for using "big words" and accused me of talking "white"? Yeah, she's my "friend". Some of the guys who, while not seeking me out for humiliation certainly had more than a few laughs at my expense (the girls are always the worse to each other), they're my "friends". So I've practiced some restraint, some selectivity. But I'm confused as to why I let even the milder offenders through?
It's through these connections that my feed is flooded with a bunch of nostalgia posts for what is the 20th anniversary of us graduating from high school and getting the fuck away from each other. Or maybe the last part only applies to me. Everyone is posting and tagging everyone else, people are commenting and waxing poetic and saying lovely things like "CSA Family Love!" and "Omg I miss you guyyysssss!!! (insert hearts here)", etc. Are they serious?
Do I sound jaded, and perhaps a tad bitter? Then why the hell am I "friends" with these people? I really don't know. I've de-friended people over less. One of them was a high school "friend" who was constantly posting uber-righty loony anti-government conspiracy theory gun talk. It was just talk, wasn't directed at me, but I was so very tired of seeing that shit on my timeline. And he was actually a nice guy in high school, a fringe element like me and the people I hung with. The high school contingent I'm still connected to on FB were definitely worse to me back then. But now they're all smiles and reminiscing. I have half a mind to comment on one of their posts and say something like, "Wow, 20 years! Can't believe it's been that long since I had someone tell me my hair looks like shit! Love you guyyyyysssss!"
Unrelated, but I really hate the new versions of the Kars for Kids commercials. Keep it Klassic.
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