9.6.08

Nostalgia

I recently became reacquainted with an old high school friend through email. She found me initially on classmates.com, which I refuse to subscribe to because it's 'pay', so after a week or two of clever profile changes, I was able to tell her where to find me on other FREE sites and eventually we connected. Her name is Amy (yeah, can you believe that - yet another Amy to add to my list - so now we have AmyMo, Acxiom Amy and HighSchool Amy). Myself, Amy and a girl named Kim were fairly inseparable in high school for 2 years, yet somehow I haven't connected with her once in the 15 years past. Probably doesn't help that I moved away from Ohio as soon as I could find an excuse, and didn't return for 10 years, and I pretty much blocked out everything prior to 1996 in my mind at the same time. Coping mechanism in part, but probably mostly due to sheer laziness on my own part - keeping in contact with peeps is hard work !

For obvious reasons, this sudden contact with HS Amy is bringing back a LOT of memories from those days, most of which are much more pleasant and fun in hindsight than reality actually was during my high school years. Thank God for that, huh? Given that I'm not usually prone to nostalgia about those days, I've been in a weird head space over it all as of late. It's quite interesting to me how much I've changed since those days in many ways, while at the same time I think I'm very much the same person deep inside. Amy sure seems to be able to relate to the now-Julie just as easily as the then-Julie, and we haven't spoken in 15 years. Given, we were VERY close back in the day, and I don't get super close to people easily so it makes sense she and I are getting along via email fine, but it's just weird considering I'm 2x as old now as I was when I saw her last.

The other side effect of this reunion is that I'm having dreams about high school again. Any time I am reminded of that time period, my dreams change for awhile. Some of the dreams are pleasant, but there is this recurring one that I can't shake that's not so pleasant. I keep dreaming that there was some problem with my graduation processing in 1993 and they revoked my diploma in modern day, forcing me to go back to High School as a 32 year old woman. And everything I hated about HS is 10x worse as an adult, yet I can't escape because I HAVE to have my diploma to hold a job. The dream situations is completely ludicrous of course, but somehow upsets me every time I have it. I mean, seriously...what's more frightening that having to deal with teenage angst at 32 years of age? Nightmare, I call it.

This weekend I started thinking about what I looked like back then (cringe!). Somewhere in this flat I have some really hilarious pics that I need to scan in and post on flickr. Absolutely shocking how nerdy and misfit I was back then - omg. Seriously, big hair, big glasses and bad clothes. Enuff said.

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