The High School Reunion – Part Two (The Ugly)

“So, how do I look?”

“Well,” she paused, taking stock of the man standing before her, “you look chubby.”

And, with those encouraging words, I was off to my 10-year reunion.

The venue for the 10-year Chantilly High School Class of 1999 was the Caribbean Breeze Restaurant in Arlington, VA. For those of you unfamiliar with the Washington, D.C., area, Arlington is a little scrap of land just outside the city whose “welcome to our city” sign reads, “Arlington: Where white kids from Northern Virginia go to live after college so they can drink like they’re still in college and avoid the the brown citizens of D.C. that scare them, eventually meet someone just like them but with the opposite genitalia and move with said person back to the suburbs from whence they came.” Which doesn’t make it a bad place. You just need to know what you’re in store for.

I was all dolled up for the night in the finest top that Turkish craftsmanship, $7 and a trip to H&M circa 2007 had to offer and a pair of pants I refer to as my “Krusties.” The Krusties are not so named for a lack of washing, but in reference to an episode of “The Simpsons” (who knew I was into that show?) where Homer goes to Krusty’s clown school and is given a pair of clown pants that are supposed to be comically big and baggy. Instead, after trying them on, he exclaims, “I’ve never had a pair of pants that fit this well in my life!” Similarly, I got the Krusties from a guy I met at a Virginia Tech party circa 2004 who was drunkenly waving them about screaming, “I just got these 38-waist pants from a thrift store. What the hell am I going to do with 38-waist pants? Anybody want these baggy, baggy pants?” Everyone erupted in laughter, myself included. Five minutes later, I approached him, quietly nodded, took the pants and went back to eating a bag of pork rinds in the corner of the room.


So this was the big night. I had no compelling reason for attending the reunion. No long-lost flames I hoped to seduce, no acne that had finally cleared up, no million-dollar job I could belittle others with. I just figured it would be nice to get out of the house and talk to a lot of people in a setting where, if the conversation got bad, I could always bail with a convenient, “Nice talking to you. We’ll have to chat on Facebook sometime!” And things went according to plan, more or less.

I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of the night because it was, in general, a continuous joy. For a guy that spent his teenage years ignoring everyone, wearing Metallica t-shirts and walking around with an expression on his face like he’d just bitten into a turd, I had somehow managed to make a ton of friends. Or at least people that liked me enough to give a shit about pretending that we’d been friends. Hell, at this age, I’m really happy with either. Sure, no one shoved their tongue down my throat (okay, just the cabbie who took me home. But in his defense, I had my top two buttons undone and was asking for it.) And no one got loaded and acted uber-slutty (okay, one person. I won’t post their name here, but if we’re ever out for drinks, I’ll let you try to guess their name via a game of Hangman on a napkin). Sometimes, though, a night is better served without anything too wild going down. Just ask the folks on the Titanic.

On the way home, I got to thinking about my time in high school and the regrets I had. I probably should have engaged in some sort of after-school activity instead of running home each day to smoke cigarettes, watch “Gargoyles” and then lock myself in my room for hours on end to do that which high school boys do (which is work on their homework. What did you think I meant?). Finding some subjects I liked and focusing on them instead of trying to live as an amalgam of Jeff Spicoli, John Bender and Randal from Clerks would have also been worth a shot.


And, most importantly, I should have been more social. At that age, in my mind, anyone that didn’t dress like they were one detention away from taking out the lunchroom with semi-automatic weaponry lived a charmed life and couldn’t possibly understand me. Simultaneously, I was so self-conscious and afraid of being judged by people that any time someone did talk to me, I would do anything I could to end the conversation as quickly as possible short of shitting my pants on the spot.


Only years later did I realize that, nice clothes or not, we are all living our lives on the same spinning dirt ball, and it only happens once. So you might as well go for whatever it is you want in life, be it talking to the cute girl across the hall or trying to land that dream job. I’m glad I finally got the chance to say hi to so many people that I spent the better part of four years not talking to as much as I should have. Believe me when I say it was fun, even if I’ll probably stop talking to you via Facebook within the week. [Cue Simple Minds’ “Don’t You Forget About Me.”] Back then, I saw too many of my classmates as I wanted to see them: In the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what I found out at my reunion was that each one of us was a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. Sincerely yours, John Papageorgiou.

Tagged as: Facebook, high school reunion, Krusty the Clown.