You were annoying in high school. Not much has changed, eh?

I just got back from my five-year high school "reunion." I use sarcastic quotation marks because a) five years isn't nearly long enough to require a reunion, and even if it were, b) most of these people still live in Wayne. How reunited do they need to be?

But I went, because hey, free drinks. Also, I thought, what the hell, free opportunity to make fun of many people at once, which was totally what happened.

Of course, the deal at these things is that everybody is happy to see everybody else, but basically falls back into old cliques and is catty about all the other cliques behind their backs (or possibly to their faces, as the night gets older and the drinks get harder). I was no exception; I just sat around with a couple of girls that I actually liked in high school and talked about how much fatter everybody is now. Because damn, Dunklau, you don't just have a spare tire, you've got a spare 18-wheeler goin' there. And you were a jackass in high school.

So this was the conclusions I drew: everybody's fatter but nobody's really changed.

I wasn't nearly as popular then as I was tonight. Or maybe I just felt more popular, because I realized that I truly I don't give a shit now what those people think, so I feel free to speak my mind. That certainly wasn't the case five or six years ago. It was sort of an amazing quiet epiphany. Of course, in high school I didn't have the advantage of alcohol to loosen my tongue, but still, the liberation from worrying about what everybody was saying about me was nice.

However, I'm not mourning the five years that separates me from another night of drunken mockery. I'm not that smug.