Standing next to your mom in Eddie Bauer holding a shirt is the great leveler.
Dear Universe,
Please no more blasts from the past. I don't know how much more I can take.
I drove home (home-home) today after work at the pharmacy and went shopping for pants with my mom. (The current pants situation is grievous, by the way. I have three pairs of pants that I like (well, and are work-appropriate), and there are five days in the work week.) We ran into the co-valedictorian of my high school class, a driven and talented and miserable girl in high school, who, based on a five-minute conversation during which we both tried to put our lives into some sort of coherent and impressive context, seems a lot happier now.
I always got the impression during high school that she felt herself to be out of my league, and going on facts it was probably true; she had above a 4.5 GPA on a 4.0 scale, she played on the boys' soccer team, she went to the University of Chicago. I have no distinct memories of her being mean to me, though, which either means that she wasn't or that it didn't cut very deep if she did. I have an awful memory.
But a friend told me, after becoming my friend late in high school, that I was generally thought of as hating the place and everyone in it. Which is a relief, if also kind of sad, because at least I wasn't being picked on. This might explain why it wasn't my pants getting pulled down during soccer practice, or why I was able to haughtily decline hazing, while a lineup of girls got smeared with condiments and flour.
The valedictorian stayed out of that stuff as well. I kind of got the feeling today that she wanted me to think highly of what she's doing now, and I can definitely cop to feeling that way too. I'd like to think that if our moms hadn't been standing there watching us like a tennis match, I'd have said, "let's be cool, so-and-so. We're not really that anymore, so we can relax."
Please no more blasts from the past. I don't know how much more I can take.
I drove home (home-home) today after work at the pharmacy and went shopping for pants with my mom. (The current pants situation is grievous, by the way. I have three pairs of pants that I like (well, and are work-appropriate), and there are five days in the work week.) We ran into the co-valedictorian of my high school class, a driven and talented and miserable girl in high school, who, based on a five-minute conversation during which we both tried to put our lives into some sort of coherent and impressive context, seems a lot happier now.
I always got the impression during high school that she felt herself to be out of my league, and going on facts it was probably true; she had above a 4.5 GPA on a 4.0 scale, she played on the boys' soccer team, she went to the University of Chicago. I have no distinct memories of her being mean to me, though, which either means that she wasn't or that it didn't cut very deep if she did. I have an awful memory.
But a friend told me, after becoming my friend late in high school, that I was generally thought of as hating the place and everyone in it. Which is a relief, if also kind of sad, because at least I wasn't being picked on. This might explain why it wasn't my pants getting pulled down during soccer practice, or why I was able to haughtily decline hazing, while a lineup of girls got smeared with condiments and flour.
The valedictorian stayed out of that stuff as well. I kind of got the feeling today that she wanted me to think highly of what she's doing now, and I can definitely cop to feeling that way too. I'd like to think that if our moms hadn't been standing there watching us like a tennis match, I'd have said, "let's be cool, so-and-so. We're not really that anymore, so we can relax."
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