Beef and Cheese

I love the line from Elf where Will Ferrell accuses the department store Santa of not being the real deal because he doesn’t smell like Santa, he smells like beef and cheese.

Well I’m not the real Santa either because I definitely smell like beef and cheese…beef, cheese and chlorine (we are LOVING my parents’ pool). Yesterday was my high school reunion and I kid you not, the buffet consisted of mounds of cheese, a few hors d’oeuvres and a giant side of beef under a hot lamp. Now I was certainly not there for the food, but beef and cheese? Seriously.

Some other random side notes include the fact that our class officers hired the reunion planning out to a random company who put on the most generic reunion I could have imagined. Not one yearbook was handy, not a single high school logo or mascot was seen. We all got a T-shirt that said our high school name and “Class of ”˜96” in boring sans serif font. There wasn’t even a mustang on it. Now I bet 1/3 of the high schools in America have a mustang as their school mascot. How hard would it have been to download a picture of a horse and put it on the shirts? I guess it was much harder than putting the name of the reunion planning company in HUGE print across the back with their web address and phone number in GINORMOUS letters.

A policeman was on duty in case we got out of control. He also posed us for our reunion picture while the photographer stood mutely watching.

They played music videos of songs that were popular while we were in high school. An old-school Backstreet Boys video came on, a video in which they were still boys and they had just made their American debut after becoming wildly popular with girls across Asia.

It made me wonder again how long I’ll be able to go by the name Daring “Young” Mom. At what point do I become the Backstreet-Old-Married-Men-With-Kids-Who-Refuse-to-Change-the-Name-of-Their-Group of the blog world?

I somehow conned my two best high school girlfriends into flying to Houston for the weekend to go to a reunion we swore we’d never attend and we had a great time seeing each other again. There were very few other people there that I recognized and even fewer who recognized me.

There wasn’t a great turnout and it seemed that the group largely consisted of the “popular” kids who intimidated the cheese out of me when I was 17. When chatting it up with people, we tried to find some sort of connection and the conversation tended to turn towards extra curricular activities.

Graduate: What did you do in high school?
Me: Besides eat beef and cheese? Um… homework.
Graduate: No, I mean extra-curriculars. Were you on dance team?
Me: Um…no. You weren’t a member of the Business Professionals of America club, were you? NHS? Theatre?
Graduate (blank stare): Were you there all 4 years?
Me: Nope. I moved to Texas from Canada Junior year. I was the Canadian Girl.
Graduate: Yeeeeaaahh… (moving on)

Truth be told, I actually met several really nice people and reconnected with a few old friends. The best part of the evening, besides the beef and cheese and the fact that after paying $120 to get in the door I was asked to pay $3 for a coke, was realizing that I am no longer intimidated by these people. I’m actually hardly intimidated by anyone anymore. I look back now and see that we all made different choices in our lives and became who we are and I’m happy with the way things turned out for me. Some people aren’t happy but for the most part we all became some form of the person we envisioned being in high school.

Sadly, I did not get the chance to confront the girl who “complimented” me senior year on my “sense of style” and my “bravery” to wear jeans every day to school. She even went so far as to tell me I should design my own clothing line and call it Katie’s Canadian Comfy Wear. She thought it would be so nice not to be burdened by fashion and to be able to wear whatever felt comfortable the way I could. Yes she carried the burden of driving the hot car her daddy bought her and wearing a different designer pants-suit every day to school, while I remain haunted to this day by a career in denim design that may never come to pass. Alas, we all must bear these little hardships as best we can.